Flash drives?

Your 2014 Mac may indeed be equipped with USB 3.0 ports.

I have a 2011 vintage Thinkpad and it came with one USB 3.0 port. 

I'm sure a Mac built 3 years later would have to have a USB 3.0 port.  Get a USB 3.0 flash drive and see what happens.  Worst comes to worse, it reverts back to 2.0 and still works.

omg dont flash while driving lol

you should get arrested for that mate!

thats awful lol

USB 2 & 3 are both backwards compatible, so they will work with previous versions.

but each version has a maximum standard of speed they adhere to.

for USB2.0, that is about 53MB per second. that is the MAXIMUM theoretical speed it can reach. the average speed is somewhere in the 40s.

but all of this is largely dependent on the port speed, the environment, and the quality of the parts/equipment in use. not all chips store data at the same rate, and USB drives usually take longer to STORE data than to read it. so when copying from one drive to another, the max speed will always be the slowest of the two speeds.

cheaper drives are typically much slower than faster ones. if a USB drive is very fast at storage, it will usually brag about its speed on the packaging. if not, then you should just assume it is slow at what it does.

The hard drive may have a larger memory buffer, which will help reduce or eliminate transfer stalls; the drive can accept more data and store it while waiting for it to be written to the disk.

Speed is determined by the ports and the stick. This is the transfer rates.

USB 2.0/Hi-Speed: 480 Mbps.

USB 3.0/SuperSpeed: 5 Gbps.

USB 3.1/SuperSpeed: 10 Gbps.