Jeff, can you let me know what issues you have had with the striped backups, I would genually like to know so I can avoid any issues going forward if I'm about to set our Sharepoint estate to be backed up this way?  I've not been able to find anything on them slowing down backups, the only drawback so far is the restores be a bit of a pain.

For the DMS the company is implementing they are storing everything in Sharepoint (decided before my time here), so now it's more a case of trying to fix issues after the fact, we've requested from the vendor a facility to mark documents as complete so we can archive but that might be a long time in coming, at the moment users are free to change any document so our problem still remains having to backup Tbs of database on a regular basis.  The only saving grace is that with Sharepoint you can set the content databases to be a maximum of 200Gb each so if you have an issue with only a few documents you can restore only that content database.

What I have found so far is striping the backups has more than halved the backup time, for CHECKDB I will need to restore each database to a separate server and kill two birds with one stone, restore test and checkdb, I can't find any alternative with the consistency check as it just take such a long time I can't let this happen on a production server.  I presume that will be another issue for Steve G as well.