Home Reviews ,,,,, USB sticks have now become what they were the diskettes of the 90s or CDs in the 2000s: they are everywhere and have very low costs. They are so common and cheap that they have become almost a disposable, but there are also those looking for more sophisticated products because as their capacity increases, 128 GB thumb drives are frequent today, and with the weight of the files, performance matters. Toshiba's Transmemory Pro EXII keys are aimed precisely at the category of those looking for an accessory of good capacity, perhaps to transfer video documents in 4K or photos in RAW. These days we have tested a 128 GB one to evaluate its performance in relation to cost, an important factor considering that the high-performance keys differ from the others both for the promise of reducing the waiting time in transferring files and for the cost which, even in the face of a constant decline, remains not entirely indifferent.
As we have said, the Toshiba Transmemory Pro, the result of the work of a company specializing among other things in memory chips, are products of the so-called “premium” range and they also want to appear on sight using a shell partly in aluminum and partly in plastic. In reality, the design seemed a little dated: they have a cap that recalls cheap products that is easy to lose and not a retractable plug like the main competitors including the SanDisk Extreme Pro. On the other hand, the stick is very light, minimalist in the profile, very oriented towards the most immediate functionality: it grips well and is solid. Finally, in terms of dimensions, it is profiled in an excellent way: it is in fact small and not bulky.
From a performance standpoint, Toshiba promises 205 MB / s for writing and 222 MB / s for reading. Tested with BlackMagic DiskSpeed Test, formatted for Mac, the speeds, as almost always happens, were parallel lower: 182.6 MB / s in writing and 207.0 MB / s in reading. In a real use test we copied a 1.74 Gb movie from the internal drive of a late 2013 MacBook Retina in 10.4 seconds, it took 39 seconds to copy a folder with 440 items of the same weight.
This performance is below the 208.1 MB / s write and 232.6 MB / s read of the SanDisk Extreme Pro dongle, tested by Cyber Layman here, which is currently the “benchmark” in the world of high-performance consumer dongles and which falls into the same category as Toshiba's Transmemory EX II
It must be said that there are tests of the same stick in circulation that have established that the performance of the Transmemory Pro is slightly higher than what we have obtained from our tests. We do not know if this is due to the fact that the key has been tested on Windows computers with NTFS or exFAT training or for the different test benchmark applications, but in the tests we have carried out on three different Macs, we have not verified fluctuations in performance that radically differed from those we recorded on the main machine.
In conclusion, the Transmemory Pro key is a product that is fully placed in the segment of high performance keys, even if its speed is not on par with that of competitors in the same price range. On its side it has small dimensions that make it very handy and not bulky when it must be used in combination with other keys or connectors.
On Amazon the 128 GB Transmemory Pro is on sale for 94 euros. The 64 GB model costs 56 euros
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