Thanks for the input! I installed a second Firewire card that I had laying around. My deck is plugged into one and my external drive into the other (I don’t have onboard Firewire). This seems to have done the trick…which makes sense since they are now on separate PCI slots.
I know external drives aren’t always the fastest, but they are so useful, especially when sharing media or keeping big on-going projects from clogging media drives.
Brett