Build Quality

Unfortunately, the entire unit appeared to be made of cheap plastic with a poor build quality. Yes, we know that most USB flash memory drives out there have a plastic chassis, but this drive feels terribly cheap.

Perhaps it's due to its super light weight. Weighing in at only 9g, it's truly feather-light. But we think it has more to do with the fact it feels like cheap Bakelite and wasn't well put together in the first place.

The cap itself was a really tight fit. It took considerable effort to pop it off, even with the help of the two rings at both ends. And when we pulled on the two rings, the whole silver trimming on the main chassis actually shifted out a little. We could easily rock it back and forth.

Replacing the cap took effort too. You literally need to shove it into place. The cap didn't feel like it was "made" for the drive. Definitely not the kind of quality or precision we expected of a Toshiba product. Most disappointing.

Drive Capacity

We then inserted the drive into a USB port to check its capacity. Take a look.

Formatted in FAT, it has a capacity of 512,589,824 bytes. If you are wondering why Windows XP shows that as 488MB, that's because storage manufacturers count storage capacity differently. As storage devices go, 512MB actually means an official capacity of only 512,000,000 bytes, not 536,870,912 bytes as you might expect.

Specifications

Here are the specifications of the 512MB model of the new Toshiba TransMemory line of USB flash memory drives.