Mac – Find out if the macbook pro has USB3

Most tech sites (annandtech, techreport, etc) include USB comparisons in their motherboard reviews. For example techreport in this review uses CystalDiskMark to compare read/write speed of various controllers. They use an external drive to test the USB speed. From the testing methods page:

The Force GT 120GB SSD was used as the system drive for all tests. The Samsung 830 Series 256GB was connected as secondary storage to test Serial ATA and USB performance, the latter through a USAP-compatible Thermaltake BlacX 5G docking station. With RoboBench, we used the Samsung SSD as the source drive and the OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 240GB as the destination for the read speed tests. Those roles were reversed for RoboBench's write speed tests.

Find a site you like and use the same tools.

Macbook Pro 15", early 2011. I had similar issues (Black screen. Crashes. A kernel panic) and noticed that the symptoms usually occurred after a period of use and usually when displaying video on the screen or when CPU load was high. Hypothesis: Machine is overheating.

I found iStat Menus from Bjango.com. This allows one to control fan speed (other apps exist but they all seem to be end of life'd. Also, iStat Menus lets you keep an eye on CPU and GPU temperatures).

After a bit of playing, I settled on using iStat Menus' "Medium" setting for fan speed. The fans are going at slightly over 4,000 RPM -- about twice usual speed. Temperatures seem stable -- and so is the computer. No crashes all afternoon (12:00 through to 19:00). Given that the machine had taken to crashing every 10 to 60 minutes previously, a definite improvement.

This solved it for me.