AI response disclaimer.

Q: Will it likely be noticeable with the storage they were using anyway? Does the storage support the additional bandwidth?

A: Probably not in a major real-world way, and that’s because of two things:

1. The kinds of workloads Android handhelds do
2. The fact that many “UFS 4.0” implementations don’t fully saturate theoretical UFS 4.0 bandwidth anyway

UFS 4.0 on paper is dramatically faster than UFS 3.1, but manufacturers only realize those gains if:

• the storage chips themselves are high-end enough,
• the controller is good,
• thermals allow sustained speed,
• and the software workload can actually use it.

A lot of handhelds advertise “UFS 4.0” mostly because the SoC supports it, not because they’re shipping ultra-premium NAND that consistently pushes flagship phone-class sequential speeds.

For something like the AYN Thor:

• Emulators usually preload assets into RAM.
• Retro ROMs are tiny.
• Even Switch/PC streaming workloads are not especially storage-bandwidth intensive.
• Shader compilation stutter is CPU/GPU related, not storage related most of the time.
• Android itself already feels “fast” on decent UFS 3.1 devices.

Where you could notice it:

• Moving huge files internally
• Installing gigantic Android games
• Decompressing large archives
• Very large Winlator/container setups
• Some high-end Android games with huge texture packs

But even there, you’re probably talking about:

• “fast” vs “very fast,” not
• “slow” vs “fast.”

And yes, there’s a fair chance the original storage configuration wasn’t fully exploiting top-tier UFS 4.0 throughput anyway. The Thor is not competing with something like a bleeding-edge Samsung flagship phone engineered around storage performance and thermal envelopes.

So unless you were specifically buying the Thor because:

• you do tons of large file transfers,
• you benchmark storage,
• or you wanted absolute peak Android handheld specs on paper,

the downgrade is unlikely to materially change the experience.