Consumers may never again have to decide which photos to delete from their phone or which songs to stream from the cloud, as Samsung has announced its first 256-gigabyte storage chips designed specifically for mobile devices.

The new silicon takes advantage of the UFS 2.0 standard, which Samsung says makes them even faster than SATA-attached SSDs used in desktop computers. Sequential reads can reach 850 megabytes per second, with sequential writes clocking 260 megabytes per second.

"By providing high-density UFS memory that is nearly twice as fast as a SATA SSD for PCs, we will contribute to a paradigm shift within the mobile data storage market," Samsung marketing exec Joo Sun Choi said in a release. "We are determined to push the competitive edge in premium storage line-ups - OEM NVMe SSDs, external SSDs, and UFS - by moving aggressively to enhance performance and capacity in all three markets."

Samsung says that the chip itself is smaller than a MicroSD card, a clear win as space inside devices is increasingly constrained by thermal needs and the desire for larger batteries.