Many years ago, there was a well-known "flash door" incident in the smartphone industry. After a brand was "captured" by mixing eMMC and UFS flash memory in the latest flagship at that time, the brand once claimed that as long as the system was properly optimized, the performance gap between the two flash memory would not be so obvious.
Obviously, such a rhetoric was not universally accepted by consumers at the time. Therefore, in the later period, the flash speed test software of mobile phones once became the object of "strict guarding" in various app stores, and even on some brands of mobile phones, even the installation of such apps will appear warning and blocking.
However, when the time comes, it is clear that the flash memory speed test on smartphones is no longer artificially limited. But does this mean that mobile phone manufacturers have "reformed" and can be completely reassuring in terms of flash memory quality? Probably not.
For example, in the flash memory speed test results of these two new machines released this year, although they both use the same version of speed measurement software, and the speed test has not been used by mobile phones before, that is to say, the "wear" deviation caused by long-term use of flash memory can be basically ruled out. But even so, it's clear that there is a significant difference in flash speed between the two models. So why is this due to performance differences between different platforms?
In fact, there is a certain possibility of this, after all, these UFS flash memories on smartphones are relatively close to the NVMe hard disk of the PC in principle. In other words, higher CPU performance does lead to higher 4K random read and write speeds.
Not to mention that some SoCs even have additional optimizations for UFS flash memory, which can inherently deliver higher queue depth concurrent read and write performance, so it's no surprise that higher flash speeds are available on models equipped with these SoCs.
In addition to the difference in the "pull" effect of flash memory caused by SoC technology and performance differences, the answer is actually yes to whether there is a difference in quality of mobile phone flash memory itself.
After all, as we all know, the current mainstream flash existence structure can be basically divided into four categories: SLC, MLC, TLC and QLC. The further forward you go, the lower the latency and the higher the performance, but the more difficult it is to make a large capacity, and the cost will increase significantly exponentially. The later the type, the larger the capacity and the cheaper it is, but with a corresponding significant degradation in performance and reliability.
For the consumer market, MLC has long been out of the market due to its lack of top-notch performance and cost. Except for a very small number of low-latency specialized SSDs (such as Samsung 983ZET and Hynix D7-5810) that are still using SLC, the current situation is basically that TLC occupies the market from flagship to high-end, and QLC represents the quality of most mainstream products.
Because of this, on smartphones, TLC and QLC flash memory will naturally be used in models with different price segments and different performance positioning. So of course, they will show different, even very different performance.
Even if they are all UFS4.0, there are also high and low fast and slow differences
Especially for some low-cost models with large capacities, it is basically unrealistic to expect them to be equipped with a good flagship SoC or to use high-quality (non-QLC) flash memory. Then for these models, their flash memory speed is slower than other models, which is naturally within the reasonable range of "cost performance".
By the way, the flash memory in today's smartphones is basically equipped with an analog SLC caching mechanism, so the "flash performance" mentioned above is actually just a "slow internal performance" after taking into account the difference between SoC performance and flash memory constitution. If the phone has been used for a long time, and the flash memory has too little remaining capacity and too many fragments, then the caching mechanism may fail. At this point, the true pure "slow performance" based on the nature of flash memory particles is exposed. The differences in different configurations and flash memory constitutions will become more obvious at this time.
[Some of the pictures in this article are from the Internet]