INTRODUCTION

   What's the very first thing you look for when out to get a brand new USB flash drive? Judging by what our friends and families choose as expected most people put price and capacity above everything else while others care about design, build quality (materials used) and performance. For casual consumers performance may not be the most crucial aspect/feature of a USB flash drive (understandable really) but for it is for professionals and enthusiasts so for the past 2 years or so we've seen numerous USB 3.0 compatible models offering impressive read/write numbers. Toshiba was amongst the first manufacturers to release a USB 3.0 compatible drive many years ago but they never really focused in performance, at least not as much as other manufacturers did. Things have now changed however and so today with us we have their latest high-end model the TransMemory-EX II 64GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive.

   Toshiba Electronics Europe (TEE) is the European electronic components business of Toshiba Corporation, which is ranked among the world’s largest semiconductor vendors. TEE offers one of the industry's broadest IC and discrete product lines including high-end memory, microcontrollers, ASICs and ASSPs for automotive, multimedia, industrial, telecoms and networking applications. The company also has a wide range of power semiconductor solutions as well as storage products including HDDs, SSDs, SD Cards and USB sticks. TEE was formed in 1973 in Neuss, Germany, providing design, manufacturing, marketing and sales and now has headquarters in Dusseldorf, Germany, with branch offices in France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. TEE employs approximately 300 people in Europe. Company president is Mr. Takashi Nagasawa.

   The TransMemory-EX II USB 3.0 flash drive (released as TransMemory Pro inside the USA) is currently available in 32/64/128GB capacities, fully supports Microsoft’s ReadyBoost technology, comes ready with Toshibas Pad Locker encryption software (for Windows) which offers increased data protection by allowing the end user to create public and private password locked partitions and is covered by a 5 year warranty. Unfortunately we don't have much info regarding the components of the drive (would be nice to see what Toshiba placed under the hood of the TransMemory-EX II drive without opening it ourselves) but its advertised numbers of up to 222MB/s read and 205MB/s write is what really matters (to hit such numbers they probably used SLC Synchronous NAND Flash). So the time has come to see what Toshiba has to offer in the USB 3.0 market with their latest TransMemory-EX II (TransMemory Pro) drives.