In our last column we looked at several new USB 3.0-ready external drives from Western Digital and Seagate.

These are must-haves for home offices and small businesses that need to speedily back up reams of data. The caveat is that to get the most efficiency out of them, you’ll need to plug in a USB 3.0 port on your desktop. This new standard allows you to back up your data 10 times faster than the old platform.

There are a number of companies that manufacture these cards, but options to get them in town are limited. Your best bet is to go online and visit vendors such as Newegg or Amazon. We acquired test units from SIIG, StarTech, SYBA — all quality manufacturers.

The verdict? All three units ran flawlessly on Windows 7 OS machines.

The challenge was to get the cards to run consistently with XP, a decade-old operating system that many small businesses in Hawaii still use.

Tony Stanford, a Honolulu-based small-business IT consultant, agreed. Getting them to work with an older OS "is a big upgrade and takes some tweaking and may require attention from an IT pro."

Despite this, we liked what we saw with the new cards.

The StarTech 2 Port SuperSpeed USB 3.0 PCI Express ($30) ran as advertised at speeds of up to 5 GB per second. We tested it on both of our XP machines, moving data from the internal drive to the external 2 TB Seagate unit. It worked fine on one XP machine, but there were hiccups on the other.

Most cards have only one or two USB ports, but if you need more the SIIG SuperSpeed USB 2-Port PCIe card combined with SIIG’s 4-Bay Hub+Host Kit ($74) offers tremendous flexibility for those with multiple hardware applications. We tested it thoroughly by exchanging data between two external drives, one connected to the PCI port and the other to the four-port hub. It ran with no loss in performance.

The SYBA PCI Express USB 3.0 unit ($30), which we tested with the Western Digital 3 TB MyBook, ended up being the most consistently stable with both XP machines. However, it did require minor tweaks on one of the computers.

"The upshot," says Stanford, "is that it may take some time to get the USB 3 card to work with the new drives on XP systems, but if you use an external backup drive on a daily basis, it’s well worth the effort."

I agree. The new USB 3.0 platform will provide a super-fast, state-of-the art backup combo that will keep your data safe.

Mike Meyer, former Internet general manager at Oceanic Time Warner Cable, now runs Islanda Managed Cloud Services, based in Honolulu. Reach him at mike.meyer@islandatech.com.