Time machine starts well, and then slow as cold molasses

Hi All,
I've scoured the net for clues, but no love.
I've set up a new external drive for TimeMachine. I created a single partition with Disk Utility, formatted as HFS+ and told TM to use it for backups.
Clicked go. Yay! Lots of data cruising along and after a short while 40GB of the 90GB backup is copied over.
And then it stops... almost. Now it copies new data over at about 1mb per minute. Checked "top" and very little activity going on. Checked console and it reports no failures of backupd and in fact backupd uses a bit of CPU time every minute or so.
In the last hour, about 80mb of data has been copied. I've opened the backup package file and am watching as each new file is copied over.
I've shut everything down more than once and restarted. When I tell it to back up, it knows where it left off... does a lot of disk churning and then begins it's crawling copy again.

Thanks for the replies. I've read about how it starts slow and later gets into a groove and picks up, but mine starts fast and flies along nicely and then grinds to a halt. I can open the package file and watch as a new file (say a 5mb video clip) gets backed up every minute or so.
During the slow time, I can copy large files onto the drive quickly and easily, so it's not the drive, or the usb connection.
Can TM go from fast to slow and back to fast? I guess I'll let it run overnight and report my results...
Message was edited by: Awumba

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Report Version: 6
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1 libSystem.B.dylib 0x00007fff800454ad mach_msg + 59
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Time machine starts well, and then slow as cold molasses

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