I have Acronis TrueImage, which got good reviews from PC Mag, as my backup software, running against a Maxtor OneTouch over USB 2.0. It's insanely slow: an incremental backup of my data partition takes more than a day. The partition is big (200G) but the delta is some small fraction of that.
I replaced my HP Scanjet 2100 with a Canon 8400C for the sole reason that online reviewers said that it was fast, but that turns out to mean a minute to scan a single magazine page. So if I want to save a 5-page magazine article, I have to dedicate something like 7-8 minutes to the task (including page flipping, "OK" clicking, etc.).