Why is my USB 2.0 vs. 3.0 performance the same?

I created a USB Recovery Drive on a friends ACER Aspire ES1-533-C55P Windows 10 laptop with a 3.0 flash drive that includes Backup system files. The computer was purchased about 3 months ago.
At first I connected the 3.0 flash drive to a USB 2.0 connector on the right side of the laptop: it two 2 hours.
Then connected that same 3.0 flash drive to a 3.0 connector on the back of the laptop: it still took two hours.
According to this article, neither 2.0 or 3.0 USB Flash drives even come close to their advertised speed; however, it does summarize that USB 3.0 reliably comes in at speeds nearly three times as fast as USB 2.0.
USB 3.0 speed: real and imagined | PCWorld
--- If that is true, my experiment shouldn't have shown the same time to do the same job: if my math is correct the 3.0 should have taken about 40 minutes.
--- Any ideas why their performances don't match up with their relative expectations?

Performance will depend on the flash drive - what is the brand/model?

From http://usb.userbenchmark.com/ you can see cheap USB 3.0 flash drives with write speeds of 8MB/s (well under USB 2.0 speeds) and high end drives with write speeds of 230MB/s.

You can also run USB Tree View (USB Device Tree Viewer) and see if your drive is properly detected as USB 3.0 (S on the icon indicates Superspeed 3.0, H on the icon indicates High speed 2.0).

I have a number of USB 3 flash drives. Some of them are no faster than USB 2 drives, others are much faster.

The manufacturers are not required to certify transfer rates.

Are you using USB 3.x cables ?

Test results from my 3 SanDisk Ultra USB 3.0 32 GB key drives:
#1 Write 19.5 MBytes/s, Read 107 MBytes/s.
#2 Write 46.1 MBytes/s, Read 111 MBytes/s.
#3 Write 12.4 MBytes/s, Read 87.4 MBytes/s.
Similar Kingston ones:
#1 Write 23.6 MBytes/s, Read 32.9 MBytes/s.
Same test of random content 1 GB size files, they would be slower with smaller files.
As you can see quite a variation in the same drive. It costs more to get anything guaranteed to be faster.

Helmut said:

As you can see quite a variation in the same drive. It costs more to get anything guaranteed to be faster.

So true. To me though, the issue was there wasn't any variation in using a USB 3.0 flash drive between using a USB 2.0 port vs. a USB 3.0 port and that's what raised my curiosity of what's going on. On the cost, I'm more interested in performance: thanks to the information posted in this thread, now I can determine which flash drives perform better than others.
As I mentioned I was working on a friends computer and 2 hours is a lot of time to help them out when I'm expecting less time than that. I'm not in the computer business but I'm a volunteer at our senior center and am willing to help those in need but I really don't want to give my time away. On my home computer, it took me only about 30 minutes to create my USB Recovery Drive when I had gotten my Win10 computer: little did I know I had a much better performance USB 3.0 flash drive. That also was factor in raising my curiosity of what's going on.

Hi folks.

if you have any spare SSD's that's the best way to make recovery disks etc. With a sata-->USB 3 connector this will simply BLOW any USB stick out of the water with regard to speed -- you won't get anything like the theoretical maximum which is anything up to 3 Gb/s for older type SATA but you'll certainly get speeds of 2 - 300 Mb/s easily.

If you do a lot of this stuff and value your time buying say a really cheap 120 GB SSD (probably only a few dollars more than a fast sandisk usb 3 stick) will pay humungous dividends in saving you time.

Cheers
jimbo