HD Video and External Hard Disks

Howdy.
I'm having a strange problem with HD video footage (1080p from various sources) and playing it back from external hard disk.
Here is the situation:
I have a new 17" Macbook Pro; if I play 1080p video directly from the internal drive, it plays with no problems at all.
I have a 1TB USB 2 external drive; 1080p video also plays back fine from this drive.
I also have 2 G-Drive's; both with a capacity of 1TB each and connected via FireWire 800 and when I try to play 1080p footage from either of these drivers, the video is very stuttery.
Now, it would be easy to say "well the G-Drives but be operating slowly", but if I copy files between them and the internal drive, the files copy very quickly; much quicker infact than copying files to the USB2 drive.
So for all transferring of files the G-Drives are much quicker than the USB2 drive.
To make matters even stranger, if I connect the same G-Drives to the MacPro we have at work, the 1080p video plays back fine.
So it seems to be the combination of my MacBook Pro + the G-Drives that dont like playing 1080p video (since the drives on another computer play fine, and my macbook pro plays the same video fine from both the internal and usb2 external drives).
It's got me baffled.
Anyone have any idea whats causing this?
Thanks.
James.

The USB drive is older but for my first tests, was actually NTFS formatted (since Id been using it on my windows PC); the files played fine even with the NTFS formatting and over 200GB of files on the drive.
I then wiped the drive and formatted as Mac OS Extended, transferred a couple of video files and played them, again they played back fine.
The thing is, if I simply move/copy files between internal drive and fire wire drive; and from internal drive to USB drive, the fire wire drives are clearly much faster.
So it's not like the fire wire drives are running slow, the problem is only in the playback of the files.
Also, as I have 2 of these fire wire drives, 1 drive is empty appart from the video files im trying to play (less than 200MB), the other drive has about 200GB on it and the video doesn't play properly on either of them.
But as i said, if I simply connect the drives up to the MacPro we have in the office, the videos play back without a hitch.
So it seems the problem is specific to playing video back from the g-drive in combination with the macbook pro (general file operations happen very fast); individually if separated and used with another device they work fine.
EDIT:
Forgot to mention.
I also tried setting the 2 fire wire (G-Drives) up as a striped raid.
Again, when moving/copying files between said raid and the internal hard disk, the transfers were very quick; but the video files (which come from various sources, i.e canon 7d slr camera, gopro HD helmet cam etc) all fail to play smoothly even from the raid.
Message was edited by: Skonk

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