Question about w & 64 bit and Acronis speed

I have used Acronis True Image 7 on my XP system for years. I have now switched to a dual core laptop running W 7 home premium 64 bit with 6 G of ram. Since Acronis 7 will not run on W 7, I have tested several Backup products to pick one. I cam across a perplexing situation between 2 products.

Months ago before I was serious I had installed a trial version of True Image 2010 but never used it. Now that am serious about it, it tells me my trial period is over and I therefore cannot really test it anymore. So, I installed instead "Seagate DiskWizard" which is slightly crippled version of Acronis to finally test it.

To decide which to purchase I did the following test, using the default settings:
I backed up the identical NTFS data partition to an external USB hard drive using
a) Acronis (Seagate DiskWizard)
b) Paragon Backup and Restore 10.2 (64 bit free version)

Acronis took 50 minutes to create the backup.
Paragon took 27 minutes to create the same backup!
Both restored correctly
Backup files were the same size, so the compression was identical.

I am leaning towards Acronis because it is a product I know but I am trying to first figure out why the Paragon was so much faster. I have to admit the speed makes it more likely that I will backup more often/.

- Could it be that was because Paragon was a 64 bit version?
- Is a 64 bi9t version of ATI in the works?
- Other explanation for the dramatic difference in speed?
- Any way to get another trial period with the latest ATI so I can test it?

Thanks.