I have a HP 960 Ultrium 3 tape drive. Since I got it, (second hand, £90) I've been experiencing shoe-shining. Writing with tar in Linux, I average about 3Mb/s write speed. I've tried replacing both the SCSI card and the cable now, both of which made no difference at all. A curiuos observation I have made is that the write rate is not consistent. Sometimes it will write for over a minute without shoeshining, but more often, just a few seconds. I've also tried several tapes, different source drives, and even writing from Windows Backup, to no avail.