All tape drives seem to be slow, but they are excellent for tape backups.
I have a 10 GB hard drive so a minimum investment for tape media for this drive was all I needed to keep my backups current. And of course somewhat noisy, but this seems to be something that users of tape devices have resigned themselves to. I installed the drive myself into my Compaq Presario 5461. It was a breeze to set up, the computer recognized it immediately. Fortunately, the drive shipped with Veritas Backup Exec, so backups were easy to do.