Why are my Exchange backups so slow?

One of my day jobs has me managing a large hybrid Exchange 2010 organization, that currently hosts almost 10TB of mailbox databases on SATA drives. As it has grown to this size, full database backups have started to exceed 2 days to complete. I've been scratching my head trying to figure out what I can do to speed it up, after all Microsoft recommends using SATA right?

What they don't tell you is that performance improvements in Exchange 2010 come at the expense of larger and slower backups. This is well explained here. The Exchange team does skirt around the issue on their blog by saying, use lagged copies or System Center DPM express backups, but they really should be more transparent on this.

So if you're planning to use traditional daily backups with your preferred 3rd party backup vendor, you may want to rethink using slower SATA storage for Exchange deployments with larger databases.