Samsung plans to double the maximum on-board storage space on smartphones to 512GB. Its new flash storage will also work quicker, making 4K recordings more viable.

The company says it’s already producing the new storage, which comes as an eight-layer embedded chip. However, it’s not confirmed if the storage will be available in the next generation of Samsung phones, such as the reported Galaxy S9 and Note 9.

Samsung hasn’t given many details about how it has made the improvements, other than that it fits the increased storage into the same size of chip, and that the power management has been rethought to “minimize the inevitable increase in energy consumed” which suggests battery life will be impacted to some degree.

As usual, any increase in data storage size or transfer speed has to be portrayed with the use example of the day. This time around it’s explained as being able to store 130 ten-minute 4K videos on the phone.

Samsung’s also stressed that the write speed of the increased storage is 400 times that of a standard microSD card, which in practical terms means features such as high resolution burst mode (taking numerous photos per second) will work more smoothly.

The company is also looking at marketing the storage outside of phones, for example in tablets, Windows laptops, and embedded devices. For example, a 4K security camera with one of the chips could have a 20 hour on-board recording buffer without having to be connected to an external hard drive.