Your customer has upgraded to faster tape technology and the backup is now taking longer. No other changes have been made. What is a possible cause of the performance degradation?

Tape buffer overload can lead to backhitching and slower backups, but it's often a symptom of the server not sustaining throughput, rather than the primary cause of a longer backup when the tape technology itself is faster.

Hardware compression typically reduces the data size, increasing effective throughput and shortening backup times, not lengthening them.

When tape technology becomes faster, if the backup server's I/O capabilities (CPU, disk I/O, network) cannot keep up with the increased speed, it will starve the tape drives, leading to a longer overall backup time as the tape drives frequently pause awaiting data.

A change in recording technology, if it's indeed 'faster' as implied by the upgrade, would not inherently cause performance degradation; it describes a physical method, not a performance issue in this context.