Samsung's new 256GB microSD card is so fast no devices support it yet

It's incredible how much storage now fits into a fingernail-sized microSD memory card.

Last year, SanDisk crammed 200GB into a microSD card and now Samsung's gone and made a 256GB microSD with the world's fastest read and write speeds -- even faster than SanDisk's own new 256GB microSD card it touted as the world's speediest only a week ago.

Samsung's new UFS (Universal Flash Storage) microSD cards come in 32, 64, 128 and 256GB capacities.

Designed for high-resolution 3D gaming and high-resolution movies, the cards boast read speeds of 530 megabytes per second (MB/s), which is about five times faster than most microSD cards. The cards also have write speeds of 170MB/s.

In comparison, SanDisk's week-old "world's fastest 256GB microSD card" (classified as UFS-1 speed) has a mere 100MB/s read speed and 90MB/s write speed.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Samsung says the high-performance transfer speeds make them as fast as SATA solid-state drives and "significantly reduce multimedia data downloading time, photo thumbnail loading time and buffer clearing time in burst shooting mode (for DSLRs)."

Need further proof that the cards are wicked fast? Samsung claims its new products only take seven seconds to save 24 JPEG images with a file size of 1.1MB after capture from a camera. With SanDisk's UHS-1 microSD card, it would take about 32 seconds.

It's all really great news, except that at this point there aren't any gadgets that can handle such fast microSD cards. Samsung also hasn't announced any pricing information or release dates. But if Samsung is smart, it's probably already working on building support for future devices including its next flagship Galaxy smartphone.

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