Many people use their smartphones extensively and pay exorbitant amounts of money for data plans. Over time, this leads to the phone’s storage capacity being depleted. Deleted files and apps eat up space and make the phone run slower. Clearing old files and apps often entails switching to a less stable platform such as a paper notebook. Doing so can make your smartphone much more manageable and help you avoid serious problems.
What is a storage chip on smartphones?
There are 2 types of storage chips on smartphones. eMMC and UFS, both have limited lifespans and will wear out overtime. We will explain them as well on this article.
What is eMMC and UFS?
eMMC and UFS are the abbreviations for embedded memory module chip and user-interface flash memory chip. These abbrevions are typically found in smartphones and tablets. The abbreviation eMMC is likely to be confused with the word “emotion”, as some people think that the abbreviation stands for emotional memory module.
However, an eMMC does not store any data; it is used to store operating system files and programs during the device’s boot process. A UFS chip is used in smartphones to support faster speeds and larger files.
Although eMMC is known to be cheaper and preffered more compared to UFS generally, though it is cheap, that doesn’t mean it’s durable. UFS storage chips are known to last longer than eMMC.
Should you get eMMC or UFS?
Some people might be confused as to why they even need UFS storage over eMMC, right? Well, they should know that UFS is far better than eMMCs in almost every aspect. The user using a smartphone with UFS will be able to launch the apps on their phone much faster than the person using a phone with eMMC.
It is based on your budget. When they released a new mobile, it will not come under a cheap price for some months. But, the difference between UFS 2.1 and 3.0 is like HDD vs. SSD. You will notice some improvements when handling a large amount of data. But the choice is yours.
How to stop it from wearing out and dying?
Well, there is quite a few steps you can do to prevent this. You can check them below.
Don’t write too much/big files
The more you write to the storage, faster it will wear out as it’s under more load. If you can, try to write things less to storage. This includes also downloads and such.
Turn off SWAP/RAM Extension(root)
If you’re on a custom ROM, you need to ask the developer on how to turn SWAP off. If you’re on MIUI though, you can use this app to set the RAM Extension amount to 0 to turn it off.
Turning off SWAP/RAM Extension makes the phone write things way less onto your storage as SWAP/RAM Extension is basically a block on your storage.
Delete files all at once instead of seperately
Although this seems weird, when you delete the files seperate one by one it does more writing on the disk. Prefer to delete the files that you want to all at once if you can.
