[KLUG Members] why is my tape drive so slow???

[Mike Williams]

I'm trying to back up my entire Linux system so I can recover in case a 
Fedora upgrade goes dreadfully wrong, and I'm having trouble.  I've 
looked at using Bacula for a backup solution, but it's much more 
complicated than what I need right now, so I'm trying to fall back to 
standbys like dump and tar.  The problem is neither of these seem to be 
able to use the tape efficiently.  It keeps backing up, I assume because 
the system isn't feeding it data fast enough.  Here's the hardware 
details:  Pentium 2 350, 192 Megs memory.  Drive system is an LVM mirror 
of fairly new 60 gig IDE hard drives.  tape is a Seagate DDS-3 SCSI 
(although I've had the same problem with an HP Colorado TR-4) controlled 
by an Adaptec 2940UW.  Redhat Linux 8.0, standard Kernel.  Since I don't 
run XWindows, shouldn't this machine be more than capable of keeping up 
with the tape drive?