Does time machine back up faster now?

I'm using Time Machine with 200+MB/s via eSATA, so, yeah, faster external ports have an influence on Time Machine's backup speed.
Every now and then in the backup process, however, the speed dips to just a few MB/s. I guess that's when it's calculating more than copying.

 

i imagine that regardless of faster 'innards', the speed of a backup will be bottle necked by the speed of the hard drive you are backing up to.

 

USB 2.0 throttles just about any hard drive.