[Park Seward]

See if any of this helps...

Use the AJA drive utility to see if your drive is performing properly.

Try another external drive.

Try another FW cable.

FW400/800 has plenty of bandwidth for audio. That is not the problem.

Check the RTAS errors checkbox.

To enable error suppression:
1 Choose Setup > Playback Engine.
2 Select Ignore Errors During Playback/Record.
3 If available, you can also select Minimize Additional I/O Latency.
4 Click OK.

Drives must be dedicated for audio (internal or external)
Mac OS file system: Mac OS Extended (also known as HFS+ format)
Mac OS Standard (HFS) formatted drives can be used for transfer, but are not recommended for recording or playback
Pro Tools does not support RAID technology. Please do not activate this feature on any Pro Tools recording drives.

Although not all FireWire drives have been fully tested with Pro Tools systems by Digidesign, you may be able to use FireWire drives from other manufacturers with similar results, given the same guidelines noted above. To date only FireWire drives with the following specifications have performed well with Pro Tools systems:

7200 RPM drive
FireWire 400 drives with the Oxford 911 FireWire chipset interface on Mac OS X & OS 9
FireWire 400 drives with the Oxford 912 or 924 FireWire chipset interface on Mac OS X 10.4
FireWire 800 drives with the Oxford 912 or 924 FireWire chipset interface on Mac OS X 10.4
FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 drives should not be combined.

MacBook Pro FW800 Models
The late 2008 and early 2009 "unibody" MacBook Pro models require an unconventional configuration due to a lack of a FireWire 400 port and only having FireWire 800 instead:

The configuration options are:

1) FW800 port —> FW800 Drive (912 or 924 chipset) —> Out FW400 port on Drive —> Pro Tools LE FireWire audio interface

2) FW800 port —> FW800 to FW400 converter cable —> FW400 Drive (911 chipset) —> Multiple FW400 Drives (911 chipset) as needed for maximum track count —> Pro Tools LE FireWire audio interface