Final Cut Freezing Constantly: Pinwheels of Death!

Hey all,
I am editing a project in Final Cut 7.0.3, and about every 5-10 minutes I have to stop editing for 1-3 minutes while the pinwheel of death spins 'round and 'round. The problem is specific to my Mac computer.... when I edit the project on a Macbook laptop, the project works fine, despite the fact that this Mac is immensely more powerful than the Macbook.
I've searched multiple on-line forums, and have already tried the following:
(1) Rebooted Final Cut Pro
(2) Rebooted the whole computer
(3) Rebooted the whole computer in safe mode (holding down the Shift key)
(4) Trashed my preferences
(5) Repaired disk permissions, verified disks, etc. (in Disk Utility)
(5) Checked to make sure I wasn't editing in some silly format like h.264
(7) Broke my larger sequence into many more tiny sequences of about five minutes each (and man, it takes forever to edit this way, and doesn't help that much).
Not sure if it's of any help, but here's some additional info:
The computer's processor is 2x3.2 GHZ Quat-Core Intel Xeon, memory is 8 GB 800 MHz DDR2 FB-Dimm.
I'm editing EX-1 footage, and my Easy Setup looks like this:
My sequence settings look like this, which works brilliantly with my footage (no render bars--green, red, or otherwise):
Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much in advance.

Hey there, David,
My media is stored on an external hard drive: a 2.0 TB Lacie drive, which is 1.9 TB full. My guess is that you'll tell me that this hard drive is too full and I should put media onto an emptier drive. This external hard drive is mirrored identically onto another hard drive of the same make and model. I use this mirrored drive (also 1.9 TB out of 2.0 full) with my Macbook laptop--same media, same project--and it works totally fine.
Oddly enough, my Mac boots off of a different eternal hard drive. Due to problems with the internal drive, the system drive is now a 500 GB Lacie external hard drive; it is used nearly exclusively for booting the system, so only 50 GB are in use. The hard drive is connected with a firewire 800, the fastest connection the hard drive allows. Is it possible that booting the system off an external is bogging the system down?
One final addition to this stockpile of notes is that a professional editor recently stopped by to help me with other Final Cut problems, and he felt strongly that we change our presets to XDCAM EX. Before then, I was using the preset Apple ProRes 422, as shown in the image below. XDCAM EX is compatible with the camera's footage I was using, which seems like a cleaner set-up: no green render bars, etc. However, I wasn't having any of these pinwheel problems before we changed the settings. Is it possible that editing with XDCAM EX as a sequence setting is somehow overwhelming Final Cut? I'm not doing anything too intense--I'm happy to edit in a lower resolution now, and render it out later, so long as this will not effect getting the highest possible resolution in the end.

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Command: Final Cut Pro
Path: /Applications/Final Cut Pro HD.app/Contents/MacOS/Final Cut Pro
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