External Lacie firewire drive slow access

Around 3 or 4 weeks ago, for seemingly no reason, the 250gb external firewire Lacie d2 drive attached to my PB started running slowly.
To give a bit more detail and example: I run iTunes off the drive and it runs fine. BUT, on most occasions, when I doubleclick the drive icon to open it, I get the beachball of doom spinning away for at least 30-40 seconds before it opens the window - the music playing then cuts out while it's accessing. Not what I expect from a firewire drive. I also hear the little beep from the drive quite often when it's trying to access.
It's getting silly. Although it will quite happily play music on shuffle for the entire evening without cutting, as soon as I try and use the drive like you would any drive (ie. navigating through files and folders), it does the beachball for 30-40 seconds thing every couple of windows. It's made it virtually unusable for everyday working (in the way that I'm going to throw it out the window if it carries on).
I can't remember if it started happening after the 10.4.7 update... I didn't do anything different to cause it, so am perplexed. Haven't tried Lacie forums yet either.
Any ideas, people?

I've now read that adding external drives to the privacy window in spotlight is a bad move. Besides, I need to find stuff and shouldn't have to turn it off (I always thought that after the initial spotlight indexing at first installation, it would just update rather than re-index the whole drive, so it shouldn't be that slow anyways... right?)
So, I've run diskwarrior, and it's optimized. Still the problem persists. LaCie tell me I have to update the firmware, but I'm a bit worried at the risk this poses to the data on the drive (ie. a sh*tload of music among other stuff). I have nowhere to put the 100gb on the drive, as I'm running a PB with a 60gig internal.
Risks?

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