Newly encountered capture problem

Question

I have a frustrating capture problem that just cropped up in a system that worked close to flawlessly in the past.
Aluminum G4 powerbook, 10.4.11, 1GB
FCE 2.0.3
External hard drive: Mercury Elite Pro FW800 on powerbook FW800 bus
Camera: Canon ZR45 attached via FW400 on a PCMCIA card FW bus
In the past (i.e. about a year ago) this system has worked almost flawlessly (i.e. 1 hour captures from tape, no problem)
In the past few days I have tried to use this system, and everything works fine for 5 minutes (i.e. the camera is recognized, I initiate capture now, it writes a file). Then at 5 minutes, the disk starts making a rhythmic click at about 1/sec and FCE freezes capture. (image frozen on screen). The tape keeps going. If I hit "esc", nothing happens. I get the whirling rainbow of doom, and nothing I can do will allow me to escape. The disk keeps ticking, FCE keeps ignoring the esc. If I attempt force quit and to unmount the disk, I have to keep doing it over and over. FCE even after force quit returns, as does the disk even though in theory, it has been trashed. After a few minutes of continually force quitting FCE and unmounting the disk, things settle down. But none of the captured material is usable ("is not a movie file") in general.
As I said, this is the same configuration of interfaces, disks, computer and camera that I have used without hitch in the past.
Oh, I also used the disk utility to check the disk and it says it doesn't need repair.
This is very frustrating, because it took me about a year of fiddling with different disks and interfaces before I got a system that could reliably capture onto my powerbook, and now it no longer seems to work.
Does anyone have any insights? Many thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Thank you for your response. I checked and it is Mac OS Extended. As far as the actual drive manufacturer, I can't figure this out from anything on the case or in the About this Mac info (posted below). It is about 2 years old, and has not been used that much. I guess it depends on what "that much" means. I transfered 18 hours of DV to it over a month period, and then wrote out 18 disks worth of qt files and dvd files to another drive. When I run "verify disk" it says "passed verification".
FireWire Bus:
Maximum Speed: Up to 800 Mb/sec
OWC Mercury Elite-AL 1:
Manufacturer: Other World Computing
Model: 0x0
GUID: 0x1D20200920366
Maximum Speed: Up to 800 Mb/sec
Connection Speed: Up to 800 Mb/sec
Sub-units:
OWC Mercury Elite-AL 1 Unit:
Unit Software Version: 0x10483
Unit Spec ID: 0x609E
Firmware Revision: 0x102
Product Revision Level: 3.AA
Sub-units:
OWC Mercury Elite-AL 1 SBP-LUN:
Capacity: 465.76 GB
Removable Media: Yes
BSD Name: disk2
OS9 Drivers: Yes
S.M.A.R.T. status: Not Supported
Volumes:
Capture Disk Mercury Elite:
Capacity: 465.64 GB
Available: 105.46 GB
Writable: Yes
File System: HFS+
BSD Name: disk2s10
Mount Point: /Volumes/Capture Disk Mercury Elite