Hard drives turning off

I have a 2 hard drive RAID set up with identical Iomega hard drives. They are both connected to a FireWire 400 hub which goes into my computer (iMac G5.) Whenever I'm doing something hard drive-intensive (exporting video from FCP, using Compressor with files from RAID, importing video to RAID scratch disk) one or both of the hard drives turns off. The blue light goes out but the drive keeps spinning. Sometimes the icon stays on the desktop, sometimes I get the Device Removal error message.
But here's the strange thing. If I plug in and turn on some other FireWire device (camcorder, A-D converter box) the blue light comes back on and the RAID starts working again.
This happens to both the drives, but usually not both at once, so I don't think the drives are bad. Would undoing the RAID solve this problem? I would hate to have to do that though because I don't believe there's away to do that without erasing the drives right? I have absolutely no idea on this one.

I have actually been running with the "Put the hard disks to sleep whenever possible" option off since before I got the drives, but they turn off anyway. I don't think it's that anyway, because 1) The option has been on for a few days and the hard drives stop spinning, but the light stays on when they are sleeping, and 2) The drive(s) only turn off (light off, disk spinning) when there is activity like copying or writing files happening. If they were sleeping it would (or should) only happen when they aren't being used. After I turned on the "Put the hard disks to sleep whenever possible" option, the drives sleep and wake up ok, but the lights are always on except when they are spinning up.

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