Since this configuration change, the daily backup was speeded up by factor of more than two.
It was really limited by the bandwidth of the RAID array.

/cvs/cds/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/backup/rsync.backup.cumlog:

...
rsync.backup start: 2013-12-20-05:00:00, end: 2013-12-20-07:04:28, errcode 0
...
rsync.backup start: 2014-01-05-05:00:00, end: 2014-01-05-05:55:04, errcode 0

(The daily backup starts from 5:00)