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. 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. We purchased this EIDE tape backup drive about a year ago.