Slow Tape Backup using IDE AIT Tape

Guys,

Could you help someone from Scotland who's stuck please? I had a Sony SCSI DDS4 drive working fine in my 600SC, then was asked to add more disk. I changed to an IDE AIT tape drive to get more tape capacity, and now it's really s-l-o-w.

It's a 533 system and the doco says that the tape drive has to be on the 3rd IDE channel (heaven know's why not 1 or 2 as I'd like to seperate teh tape and DVD drives) so that's where I've put it, along with the DVD ROM drive. There's nothing on IDE channels 1 or 2, as teh disk is all SCSI connected to a PERC raid controller. The IDE BIOS setting is IDE channel 1 & 3 enabled at ATA33 max.

I'm getting 25MB/minute using Backup exec 9. That translated to a 11 hour daily backup stripped down as far as possible and an almost impossible friday backup (50 hours plus). Try verifying after that!

I'd be delighted if anyone could suggest either reasons for limiting where the tape can be connected or even better possible fixes.

One more thing - o/s is w2k sbs with SP4 and in device manager ide 1 and 2 have the options to change DMA or PIO mode, but the 3rd channel does not. The driver files are different.

Many thanks in advance (even if you've just managed to read to the end of this post!)

Alan