Verifying USB connection speed (USB 3 or USB 2?)

11 Oct.,2022

 

High Speed USB

HDMI connections

Another way to check whether you are using a USB 3.0 connection or not is to use USBView.exe from Windows Driver Kit (WDK)

You could also use USB Device Tree Viewer, which is very similar to USBView.exe and you won't have to download the huge WDK to use it.

EDITED: in the screenshot below, H is for high-speed (480 Mbit/s) so USB 2.0. F is for full-speed (12 Mbit/s), which can be USB 1.1 or 2.0.

When you run USB Device Tree Viewer, you'll see a list of USB Host Controllers (there are 3 on my notebook). You could cycle through each port of the USB Root Hubs attached to these controllers to see what's connected to that port. You'll find that each USB device connected to your computer (mouse, WiFi or Bluetooth adapter, webcam, etc.) show up on one of those ports.

Detach all flash drives and external hard disks from your computer and look for a USB controller that has no devices attached to any of its ports (on my computer, it is USB xHCI Compliant Host Controller). Now attach a flash drive or external HDD that you wish to test and you'll notice that it is connected to one of the ports of the USB Root Hub attached to that controller.

If you attached a flash drive, it would show up as:

USB Mass Storage Device - [ASSIGNED_DRIVELETTER]

Click on it and look for the Connection Information section on the information pane to the right.

If the device is connected in USB 3.0 SuperSpeed mode, it will show:

Device Bus Speed         : 0x03 (SuperSpeed)

For USB 2.0, it will show:

Device Bus Speed         : 0x02 (High-Speed)

For USB 1.1, it will show:

Device Bus Speed         : 0x01 (Full-Speed)

Besides this, there are also several other methods that are explained in great detail here