XDA Developers forum has discovered that some Galaxy S8/S8+ models have UFS 2.0, while others have UFS 2.1.
An interesting article has popped up over at the popular XDA Developers Forum site which uncovers the fact that Samsung once promised the UFS 2.1 standard for storage, but no longer does so.
Indeed, it’s not just Samsung that has done this, with XDA Developers also reporting several weeks ago that Huawei not only did this, but did something much worse.
XDA says that, in a nutshell, “the Huawei P10 and the P10 Plus could feature any combination of LPDDR3 or LPDDR4 for the RAM and eMMC 5.1, UFS 2.0, or UFS 2.1 for the storage.”
{loadposition alex08}That’s sad to see. It would be like buying a car at a set price, but getting electric windows and turbo for one customer, and getting manual windows and no turbo for another.
Where’s the fairness in that when you’re paying the same price?
Let us hope Huawei never does such a thing again.
Different hardware in devices isn’t new. Apple has done it with processors from Samsung in some models and TSMC in others, as well as Qualcomm baseband chips in some models and Intel baseband in others.
Samsung has done this for years too, offering Qualcomm chips in some markets and its own Exynos chips in others. The S8 and S8+ are prime examples of this, with Qualcomm processors used in North America, while Exynos processors are used everywhere else.
In general, when Samsung and Apple do this, there is an equivalency between parts. Sure, the Samsung and TSMC processor parts were different sizes, but the performance differences were minor and did not impact on end users in any truly discernible way.
The same goes for the S8 and S8+ which show little real-world difference between both processors.
However, when it comes to storage and memory standards which have fundamentally different performance ratings, then you really are playing a ‘hardware lottery’ as XDA Developers has ably described the situation.
For example, XDA Developers notes that “the UFS 2.1 devices get sequential read speeds hovering between 700-800 MBps, while those with UFS 2.0 for storage would get sequential read speeds in the range of 500-600 MBps.”
XDA does say that most users “will not be able to distinguish” the performance between both storage standards, but then points out if you’re paying flagship prices for “the best smartphone”, you should be getting it!
There’s a lot of very interesting comments over at the XDA-Developers article that are a must read, including the fact that Apple uses PCIe NVMe SSDs in iPhones getting 1GB/s+ sequential read speeds compared to Samsung’s UFS getting speeds as slow as half as fast.
What makes the situation worse is the fact Samsung was advertising S8 and S8+ models as having UFS 2.1, and then after the fact, changing this by deleting any reference to UFS 2.1.
XDA-Developers has screenshots to prove this.
It seems to me that what customers want is honesty, especially if they’re paying top dollar.
Sadly, there’s no way, as yet, to determine what hardware your S8 or S8+ has inside it until you buy it – something that was the case with Apple’s hardware differences as described above, too.
Thankfully, real-world performance for the S8 models appears not to be compromised, and it is important for companies like Samsung and Apple to have quality hardware manufacturers to choose from.
However, when it comes to storage standards and, in the case of Huawei, memory standards as well, consistency is something no customer will ever complain about.
Read more at XDA-Developers Forum, including how you can find out which UFS standard is in the S8 or S8+ model you own.