LTO-2 tape device is very slow?

[C. Linus Hicks]

On Tue, 2004-12-14 at 14:25 -0800, Tom Haws wrote:
> I'm having problems adding an Exabyte Magnum LTO-2 tape device to my RHL 
> 9 machine.  I know that's a different OS, so thius question should go in 
> the shrike lists, but it's close enough to Fedora that I thought I might 
> get some answers here, and the shrike lists are just about dead now.  
> Red Hat announced the end of RHL 9 2 months after I installed a 
> production server on it...  arrrghh...
> 
> Anyway, after I add the device, it shows up fine in /proc/scsi/sci, and 
> I can write to it, but it is extremely slow.  I got about 30MB written 
> in 5 minutes!  Has anyone else had any experience with LTO-2 devices on 
> Fedora or RHL 9 systems, and is there anything I can do to recreate 
> device files or anything to speed it up?
> 
> Also, do you know if I do a "mknod -m 666 /dev/st0 c 9 0" with the tape 
> drive hooked up, does it do anything different than if there wasn't one 
> installed?  Like read the status bits on the drive to tell what it's 
> capabilities are?

Have you tried their LTO Tool?

ftp://ftp.exabyte.com/pub//tools/lto/ltoTool_Linux_V4.34_readme.txt