Are you ready for the world of 5G? Even if you are, the available storage you have on your favorite devices may not be as robust as you’d like it to be.

Anticipating this problem, Western Digital has announced a new bit of technology that will be available on the next generation of devices. The new technology is a new Universal Flash Storage (UFS) device that will go a long way toward ensuring that storage isn’t the performance bottleneck on the new, more robust network.

Western Digital’s Itzik Gilboa had this to say about the new technology:

“Clearly, 5G will bring on new types of very high-performance applications – from gaming to AR / VR, machine learning and AI. Yet these applications can only exist if they have the hardware to support the performance levels they require…our goal is to make sure that our part in the data path is never the limiting factor for the user experience.”

We don’t know much about the new drives, but we do know that they’ll use multi-level NAND to achieve better cost efficiencies and offer sequential write speeds of up to 800MB/s. This will be a big benefit to gamers, to people downloading high resolution (4k and 8k) media files, and to anyone who is in the habit of transferring large amounts of data from the cloud.

According to the Western Digital announcement, the new drives will be available beginning in March 2020, and will be available in your choice of 128 GB and 256 GB configurations.

This is excellent news and we’re very excited to give the new tech a test drive. If they live up to the hype, they’ll be good additions indeed. Any device outfitted with one of these will be well-positioned to take advantage of everything the world of 5G has to offer.