[albee1952]

No harm in trying trashing prefs anyway so go for that. I am curious why you chose to partition in 5 parts? The LaCie drives I have are not large enough to warrant partitioning (120-160 gig) so I don't know if that is having any affect. On drives of 200 gig or more, I generally partition in half but that's just a personal preference. I would be using both cores and try running the drive on a firewire 400 port. If you only have a single port, daisychain the drive to the computer and the 003 to the drive passthru. If the drive has no 400 passthru, put the 003 first and try a recording. While this chain is not recommended, it will work for the purpose of testing. Just make sure to dismount the drive before you shut down the 003(the reason DIGI does not like this chain is in case the 003 gets turned off while the drive is writing data, it will corrupt the data). If it records longer, then we know the FW800 port is to blame.