When I attempt to change tapes via the software interface, such as export and import, the job runs for over 20 minutes. What can I do to speed this process up, what is causing the slow down of such a simplistic function?
import/export functions do not normally take very long. Most likely there is some alert that comes up when the operation is kicked off that doesn't get responded to and the job sits there until the alert times out. Answer any alert that comes up when you run those commands. If no alerts pop up, they may be in the alerts screen. If they only appear there, you can configure them to pop up by going to Tools | Options | Preverences and checking the 'Automatically display new alerts' checkbox.
