"bounce to disk" stutter problem

[calden]

Hello:

I recently got a firewire hard drive (OWC Mercury Elite) to use with my iBook and protools free; needed the extra storage. Plugged it in and it worked fine. I did some editing and then burned to disk to make aif files. After about an hour and a half of work I then move the setup downstairs to my basement studio, and something strange happened. I suddenly could no longer record, getting an error code 9060. Okay, I quickly researched the problem here on the DUC and found that I needed to reformat the drive with Mac utilities and disable the extension drivers that came with the drive. Did that, and could record.

But something else changed - Now when I "bounce to disk" it sounds stuttery. THe music bleeps out for a split second, about every second, with each blip of the hard drive as it writes. (It also does this bouncing to the internal drive as well, which it never did before.) After freaking out over this I did a test and found that although it stutters when bouncing, the final aiff file plays fine in iTunes.

This has never happened before with my ProTools free setup, and didn't happen the first few hours of using this drive. Because it happens whether I bounce to the internal or external drive it must be something newly different with Protools free, and not with the new hard drive, right? It bugs me because it shouldn't be happening, and I keep waiting for something else to malfunction.

Anyone have any experience with this? If so, is there a fix?

Thanks,
Carlos