Will these new Samsung USB-C flash drives replace microSD storage?

Before Samsung unveiled the new Galaxy S22 flagship phones at the beginning of February, many were hoping that it would return the beloved microSD card slot. It was mostly the Ultra model that fans expected to include this feature, but alas, it wasn’t so.

Now, maybe in some effort to counteract some of the disappointment, Samsung has released a new USB-C flash drive, available in several different storage options: 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB. All versions of the drives come with the company’s NAND flash chips inside and USB 3.1 connectivity, which is also backward compatible with USB 2.0.

Now, you would be forgiven if you immediately thought this hardly makes up for the lack of microSD storage, but let us try and look at it from a different perspective. Yes, obviously the flash drive, unlike the microSD card, sticks out of your phone. Moreover, none of these three storage options offer a significant amount of expansion.

Speed over storage?

That is where speed comes into play, however. Samsung claims that these new USB Type-C flash drives are capable of up to 400MB/s sequential read speeds. According to the tech giant that’s enough to transfer 4GB files for as quickly as 11 seconds.*As a side note, keep in mind that while the 128GB and 256GB models are capable of 400MB/s speeds, the 64GB one can only go up to 300MB/s (which is still pretty quick).

So, in other words, instead of storing files for longer on large storage microSD cards, the approach here would be to use the fast transfer speeds and quickly move your files someplace else from time to time.

Of course, even with this point of view, we cannot say that using a USB Type-C flash drive can replace an internal microSD card, no matter how tiny it is—after all, it’s still external. Nevertheless, it is not a bad workaround and doesn’t take that much to adjust to.

Samsung is yet to put a price on these flash drives. Depending on their cost, they could prove a more viable option compared to buying a Galaxy with more internal storage.