How does eUFS storage actually perform?
No one wants a laptop with dramatically slower storage. I know I raised an eyebrow at eUFS for that very reason, having been burned by slow eMMC-based laptops in the past.
Spoiler: eUFS actually holds its own against the kinds of PCIe SSDs you’d find in similarly specced lightweight laptops. But you wouldn’t want eUFS storage in a gaming laptop any time soon. The performance is there for everyday tasks, but it isn’t that good yet.
Chris Hoffman / Foundry
I ran some quick informal benchmarks on the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge when I reviewed it last summer, comparing it to other Copilot+ PCs with Qualcomm Snapdragon hardware. (Unfortunately, since PCMark doesn’t run on Arm PCs yet, we can’t compare the Book4 Edge’s storage benchmark scores with our usual benchmark suite.)
My conclusion? The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge’s storage was, overall, right in the ballpark of similar laptops I was reviewing — a tad slower than the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, but a bit faster than the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, with both of those laptops having PCIe 4.0 SSDs. The results depend on what exactly you’re benchmarking (sequential read versus sequential write performance, for example).
Notebookcheck’s extremely detailed storage benchmarks for the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge found the same thing:
How can that be? Isn’t eUFS storage supposed to be slower than PCIe SSD storage? In theory, yes. The specification for SSDs tops out at a higher speed. But in the real world, laptops don’t always pack high-end storage drives that reach those theoretical limits of speed.
So, here’s the takeaway: laptop eUFS storage offers performance that’s good enough for most people, at least with typical productivity laptops meant for browsing the web, writing emails, and other daily driver stuff. Unless the laptop’s manufacturer made a huge mistake, it’ll deliver similar performance to other laptops in the same price range.
Just don’t expect it to deliver top-end speeds. For a gaming laptop or productivity workstation where you need fast storage speeds, you should still avoid eUFS for now. (Luckily, you won’t even encounter eUFS on laptops like this. It’s only on lightweight portability-focused machines.)
