I apologize in advance if this issue has been addressed.

I'm buying a portable USB 2/USB 3 external hard drive for backup and storage.
Currently I back up to a eSATA hard drive in the Ultrabase bay.

What kind of speeds should I expect backing up to the external drive?
Are all the USB ports on the X201T just USB 2?

I looked on the spec sheet and didn't see USB 1 or 2 or 3 specified. I didn't look in the hardware maintenance manual.

By the way, I still use a Seagate 500 gb 2.5 inch hard drive in the internal hard drive bay. It is not noticably slower than the 128 gb SSD drive I purchased with the X201T

OS is Win7 Pro x64 with 8 gb of ram.

USB 3.0 comes with the new Intel Sandy Bridge processors which X201T doesn't have. Even then, not all Thinkpad refresh laptops would get USB 3.0 given that they have Sandy Bridge, for instance T420 still has USB 2.0.

Strictly speaking, there is no connection between USB3 and Sandy Bridge. It is not integrated in the chipset, but on a separate controller. This is why some previous generation machines (like W510) already have it.