External Firewire HDD causes hangs on my Mac Pro & HDD lag using finder

External Firewire HDD causes hangs on my Mac Pro & HDD lag using finder.
I have an 2008 Mac Pro 8 core 2.66hz, 10GB Mem, ATI HD4870 with 4 internal 1 TB Drives. I have 3 external HDDs (2 USB + 1 FW400). The 2 USB HDDs are for Time Machine and backups.
The external FW HD is a 1TB bootable clone of my Internal 1 TB boot HDD.
I have 2 problems ... somethimes when using finder or opening a folder, copying files, starting or quiting a program, I get the spinning beach ball that seems to hang the Mac.
I power off the external FW HDD and everything starts to work. I get an error about the device going offline, I then power the FW HDD back on and all is good.
It seems the external FW Drive tends to hang the system. It occurs pretty frequently.
Any recommendations?
The other issue is that when I use finder to go to a folder, I seem to have to wait for all these drive to spin up. You can hear them all start whirring.
is there a way to remove that lag?

If you recently moved to Snow Leopard you might look for new firmware for your external drive. I would also get DiskWarrior and run that on the external and consider programs like Drive Genius. You might also back it up and wipe it and restore the data. After that I'd consider looking at a new external.
Sleeping drives that take time to spin up after waking....I'd like to learn how to stop that myself. Be sure the Energy Saver in System Preferences is set to not put drives to sleep when possible. Even then my drives will go to sleep and I have up to 6 external added at times and they take quite a while to all spin up. I've never found a way to prevent that.
BTW...external USB drives on a MacPro? Really? Even for backup....

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