Introduction.
This is going to be a two-part series of “The Forgotten Bottlenecks”. The first part covers Phone Storage Speeds, and the second part covers Laptop Chipsets.
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Storage Speed.
The most overlooked component in a phone’s performance is the storage speed. Everyone is busy looking at SOC, RAM, Screen,OS but fails to check the storage performance. If you have ever upgraded a computer from a Hard Drive to SSD, and seen boot times go from minutes to seconds, app launch times cut in half, and overall system responsiveness improved more than any other upgrade. Then you understand what a massive impact storage speed makes.
BEnchmarks
It’s been incredibly difficult to find different flash memory tested on the same SOC. As well as finding how storage affects android performance in general. So if you have some better articles please leave a comment.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254006169_Examining_storage_performance_on_mobile_devices
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261960708_IO_scheduling_in_Android_devices_with_flash_storage
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2557977.2558025
https://nerdschalk.com/pokemon-go-load-time-shows-difference-between-ufs2-0-and-ufs2-1-storage/
https://lwn.net/Articles/756627/
http://events17.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/Linux%20Storage%20System%20Bottleneck%20Exploration%20V0.3.pdf
That being said as all Modern Os’s rely heavily on random IOPS performance, the premise of this article holds true.
Phone Flash Memory Speeds Compared
So just how big of a difference is there between flash. Well, actually it’s bigger than even I imagined. Here is a quick look at standard EMMC and UFS specs. Remember the random R/W is way more important for day-to-day use cases.
CONCLUSION
So just remember the next time you buy a phone to not just compare SOCs or RAM. But storage speeds as well:)
