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I have a 2 year old USB 2.0 SanDisk 32 GB pendrive. My laptop (HP 15s GR0007au) has only 2 USB ports and they're both USB 3.0

Laptop has currently Windows 10 and I will clean install a different version of Win 10 tomorrow.

My question is, will it be a problem during the installation if I use 2.0 drive on a 3.0 port? As during installation and formatting, the PC will NO LONGER HAVE USB 3.0 drivers. Hence failure during installation?

2 year back I installed Win 7 on a DOS laptop and it straight away warned me to use USB 2.0 port as it didn't have 3.0 drivers then, making that (3.0) port unusable.

Thoughts please, thank you!

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    “As during installation and formatting, the PC will NO LONGER HAVE USB 3.0 drivers.” - This is absolutely false. The Windows 10 installation environment fully supports USB 3 and USB 2. Furthermore only the Windows 7 installation environment didn’t support USB 3 out of the box. Windows 7 once installed had USB 3 support built-in
    – Ramhound
    Commented Jan 1, 2021 at 23:02

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USB is backwards compatible. The communication across the port will only occur at USB2 speeds, but that will not be a significant issue for installation.

I've installed Windows 10 many times from USB2 drives over USB3 ports, and never had any issues. There's been no need to install drivers or anything.

Windows 7 is a very old OS compared to Windows 10. I would guess your worries based on your previous experience were likely due to the old software being run on newer hardware. Windows 10 is not old software.

UPDATE: Windows 10 includes, baked-in, support for USB3. While it may lack drivers for your specific controller or chipset in the base image, it can handle the default USB3 protocol without requiring any additional drivers: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/usbcon/supported-usb-classes

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  • If you never had problems you are lucky. Especially third party USB chips can make problems when the OS to be booted does not have the necessary drivers integrated.
    – Robert
    Commented Jan 1, 2021 at 21:23
  • @Robert - Your experience with Windows 7 isn’t applicable to Windows 10. You can install Windows 10 out of the box without any changes through both USB 2 and USB 3. Windows 7 could also be installed through a USB 3 provided drivers were added to the ISO (took a matter of minutes to make that happen).
    – Ramhound
    Commented Jan 1, 2021 at 23:04
  • @Ramhound That's what I wanted to hear. Happy to know that Windows 10 wouldn't need any additional driver installation. Thank you so much.
    – Rajat Khanduri
    Commented Jan 2, 2021 at 2:12

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