My external hard drives seem to slow down my iMac

Hello,
I've encountered an odd situation in that the external hard drives I use to hold all of my files seem to slow down the performance of my iMac. I have two Lacie 1 tb externals plugged into my 2006 2.0 Ghz iMac with 2 gig of ram. I've had these two externals for about two months and for the same amount of time, any other item (ipod, card reader, thumb drive) I'd plug in would take several min to mount onto my computer. From there, the data transfer from my external or internal hard drive is slightly delayed and slower as well.
I unmounted these externals today and plugged in a thumb drive to test and it immediately mounted to my computer! I never thought an external could effect the mounting of other, smaller, externals!
I'm just wondering if there's anything I can do to fix this problem? My itunes music files are stored on my externals and I'm a photographer, so I'd need regular access to my externals to get to my pictures.
Thanks for all your help. I can usually find the answer to my problem by browsing around in discussions, but I find this situation to be a bit of a unique one!

kromedomio wrote:
Sorry, It's connected to my iMac via Firewire 400. I have the externals connected to each other via Firewire 800.
In regards to types of files, I have my itunes library, photo (Raw Canon 50d files), Adobe (photoshop, indesign, illustrator) and Word files all on the external. I basically moved everything off my internal and store it all on my external now, so I'm accessing it a lot through the day.
I'm wondering just why you did that. Surely you know that F/W 400 is much slower than your internal HD?
I'd be inclined to move things that involve heavy I/O during editing (photos and videos, especially) back to the internal. I suspect you'll see a large improvement.

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