When buying phones, we factor in storage capacity as one of our priorities. These days, we expect to get a phone with at least 256GB storage given the increasing sizes of media files and apps. What tends to get overlooked, however, are the type of phone storage used. 

There are two types of phone storage that’s used: eMMC and UFS. The latter is often used on more expensive phones, while the former is often found on budget phones. Why does it matter to know the storage type a phone uses? Because one is significantly slower than the other. 

eMMC is slower because it was a standard that was introduced back in 1997 as a traditional storage choice for electronics. eMMC 5.1 is the latest iteration, and has average read and write speeds of 330MB/s and 200MB/s respectively. On the Redmi 14C, we got read speeds of 293.18MB/s and write speeds of 222.97MB/s. While this should be good enough for general use, eMMC will struggle when dealing with large files and apps especially with loading times.

That’s where UFS comes in.

Introduced in 2011, what makes UFS storage different from eMMC is that it is a full duplex design that allows simultaneous read and write operations–unlike with eMMC’s half duplex design that can’t do simultaneous read or write operation. UFS 2.2 is the most popular storage type used by most budget phones, boasting average read and write speeds of 850MB/s and 250MB/s respectively. With the vivo V40 Lite, we got read speeds of 814.6MB/s and write speeds of 791.58MB/s.

Comparing both UFS 2.2 and eMMC 5.1 side-by-side, and the numbers paint a clearer picture on why UFS storage would load apps faster compared to eMMC besides other factors like processor. This becomes more evident with games, as UFS storage loads games at more than double the speed compared to eMMC.

While budget phones would opt for UFS 2.2, midrange phones would go for either UFS 2.2 or UFS 3.1. Introduced in 2020 for flagship phones during that time, UFS 3.1 bumps up read and write speeds significantly at 2100MB/s and 1200MB/s respectively, making this phone storage type more ideal for handling huge files like 4K videos, RAW image files, and large games like Genshin Impact (which has a size of 31GB as of the latest version).

The realme 13 Pro+ is one of the midrange phones that use UFS 3.1. and it delivers read speeds of 1560.7MB/s and write speeds of 1560.7MB/s. The jump in read and write speeds translates to app loading times being a few seconds faster compared to a phone using UFS 2.2, which can be significant especially for power users who would multitask a lot or use demanding apps on their phone.

So when looking for a phone, here are our key takeways: aside from the capacity, you should also check the storage type used. For budget phones, UFS 2.2 is your best option (though there are rare budget phones that use UFS 3.1 like the ZTE Blade A75 5G). For midrange phones, UFS 2.2 may be fine but we highly recommend looking for models that use UFS 3.1 especially if you’re spending Php 20,000 or above.

There are a few midrange phones that use UFS 4.0, which give you insane read and write speeds of 4300MB/s and 4000MB/s, closely matching what NVMe SSDs have to offer. Currently, only the POCO X6 Pro and POCO F6 are the midrange phones that use UFS 4.0 storage. If you want a phone with UFS 4.0 storage, your best bet is with flagship killer devices like the POCO F6 Pro and realme GT 6.