Slow start when record to external hard drive

I'm new to this so bare with me. When set up to record multitrack to my external drive, (via firewire 400 connection) it takes several minutes to start on my macbook. Seems to start ok with internal hard drive. Also experiencing disc too slow error about 40 minutes into recording. Any help would be appreciated.

Open up Disk utility. It's in your Utilities Folder.
Select your external disk in the left column.
In the lower left corner, you should see this, which will tell you how it's formatted:
!http://web.me.com/johnalcock/filechute/DiskFormat.png!
If it says Mac OS Extended, you're OK, and there's another problem.
If it doesn't (it might say FAT32 or NFTS) then _backup all the contents of that drive first_, and after you're sure it's backed up, format the drive, following the instructions in Disk Utility.

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