Does my rMBP Mid 2014 have USB 1.0?

S

SvenneDK

macrumors newbie
In the search of af new external harddrive, with USB 3.0, and figuring out if I should choose 5400RPM or 7200RPM, I looked into the system report of my newly purchased (used) rMBP Mid 2014 and am wondering how come the system report shows USB speeds for "up to 12 mbps" when it should be "up to 5 Gbps".

Apple Support - Using USB device with your Mac
Apple Support - MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014) - Technical Specifications

What am I missing?

I don't have any devices/pepherials to actually test the speed of the two USB ports.

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Your Macbook definitely has USB 3.0 as my late 2013 13" Pro has it.

I'll check my Macbook when I get home to see if mine says the same thing. But wouldn't the 12 Mb/s refer to Bluetooth transfer rate?

Edit: my late 2013 13" MBP shows the same thing but I am definitely get usb 3.0 transfer speeds to a USB 3.0 drive.
 
Last edited:
An internal USB bus exist to power integrated devices such as bluetooth, isight, SD card (although this is PCIE on some model Macs), and the keyboard. This is usually connected to the PCH. On the 2014 this might be a variant or identical to the the E2088369 Platform Controller Hub found on the 2012 MBP.

Think of it like a tiny USB 1.0 hub connected directly to some USB 3.0 ports on the motherboard and then there are some equally tiny cables running directly to the hub. This allows you to dedicate just enough bandwidth to these devices while giving the bandwidth intensive stuff they need (such as the GPU, memory, SSD).
 
Those are the devices connected to the MBP's internal USB bus, both Bluetooth and the trackpad only go up to USB 1.1 speed.
 
The speed is being reported on a per device basis. The keyboard and the bluetooth controller need very little, so they're USB 1.1 devices. If you plug in a USB 2.0 device, it will report up to 480 Mb/s for that device, and up to 5 Gb/s for a USB 3.0 device. The controller is USB 3.0, so it will handle any of those speeds.
 
As others have alluded to, you need to use a flash drive that has a faster controller and memory on it. The one you're using is slow.

If you prefer Sandisk, the Sandisk Extreme Pro flash drives are the ones you need to be buying in order to come closer to USB 3.0 speeds.

https://www.sandisk.com/home/usb-flash/extremepro-usb

Note: The new ones are USB 3.1 drives, but are backward compatible with older generation USB ports (USB 3.0 and 2.0.)
 
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