Firewire 800 and mbp 2011

I have a new macbook pro 2011 15" i7 2.3, i'am also using a western digital USB 2.0 & FW800 external 2.5" drive that works without problems with my previous macbook pro (early 2007) and with my current iMac (2010) using the fw800 port.
Now every time i try to transfer large files to the external drive connected to the fw800 port the drive stalls during the transfer and after a while also the finder go in a loop and i have to unplug the drive to resume "normal" operation....
Using the drive with the USB 2.0 port works, also works a fw400 2.5" external drive and an external 3.5" fw800 wd drive, with its own power adapter.
Maybe a problem with the power supplied from the port to bus powered fw800 drives ?
M.

I've tested my drive several times under two configurations. I alternated between FW800 and USB 2.0. The Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex is a SATA Drive in a plastic case. The SATA port is exposed on the back, and Seagate ships it with a "USB Cable" which is a USB to SATA adapter that plugs into the back. They also ship a FW800 version. I have both.
Before each attempt to use the drive, I partitioned the drive.
Run 1: FW800: Plug in drive, partition, start time machine backing up 500GB of data.
Result: Lockup after 4.39GB of data. Verified in finder, drive is not responsive. Time machine "cancels backup" for around 5 minutes before I bail.
Run 2: FW800: Plug in drive, partition, start time machine backing up 500GB of data.
Result: Lockup a bit after 6GB of data. May have been 4.39 GB of data again. Verified lockup in finder. Time Machine unable to cancel backup.
Run 3: USB 2.0: Plug in drive, partition, start time machine backing up 500GB of data.
Result: Time machine makes it to 12GB when I decide "maybe it is fixed" and want to try firewire again. Drive remained responsive, and Time Machine cancels backup immediately.
Run 4: FW800: Plug in drive, partition, star time machine backing up 500GB of data.
Result: Time machine makes it to 4.39GB of data (exactly again!) before the drive locks up. Attempt to verify lockup by copying empty folder (just created) to drive. Unable to copy folder and unable to cancel Time Machine.
Run 5: USB 2.0: Plug in drive. This time for variety, I partitioned it and started Time Machine backing up 500GB of data.
Result: 27.71GB in and I'm not stopping it. Able to copy the empty folder to the drive while time machine is running with no problems.
Overall Results: Two constants in this experiment: The drive and the Laptop. The change is the SATA adapter used to connect to the drive, and the port on the laptop where the drive was plugged in.
Consistently unable to connect via firewire, and consistently able to connect via USB 2.0.
Conclusion: Either my drives FW800 adapter is broken, or there is a problem with the FW800 port of my 2011 MacBook Pro 15" (2GHz) Since the FW800 adapter has been in regular use for the last 6 months, I believe the issue is with the FW800 port on the new laptop.
The only question in my mind is whether this is a hardware defect, a design problem, or a software problem.

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