Backup Performance best practices
Firstly, I'd encourage you to stop using maintenance plans for your backups.  Ola Hallengren's maintenance scripts are used by a LOT of people.  Simply schedule them using the SQL Agent.

I agree that taking steps to ensure your backup process is optimal, but I'd also encourage you to think about your restore strategy as well. 

By taking transaction log backups every hour, you are saying it's ok to lose up to 1 hour of updates should you need to restore. IMO, implementing more granular backups is really no more difficult and brings some additional piece of mind.  See Back Up Transaction Logs Every Minute. Yes, Really.

When researching and developing a restore strategy, the main two things you'll tend to see over and over are: RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective).

RTO basically is the maximum time allowed to get things back to 'normal' or at least functioning. You would need to take into consideration small problems (server went down) to big problems (the building just exploded).

RPO basically is, how much data could we 'possibly' lose should a bad problem happen? 5 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day, NONE?

Take some time to read The 9 Letters That Get DBAs Fired
(Basically RPO, RTO and CYA).

Also, The Accidental DBA (Day 8 of 30): Backups: Planning a Recovery Strategy, discusses Designing a Restore Strategy.

One last thing - develop a plan to routinely test your backups.  

The only way to verify a backup is good/usable is to restore it.

REPEAT – you don’t know you have a good backup until you have restored it! 

I provided an example in my answer to How to conduct integrity test on SQL Server database backup file?