Thunderbolt to Firewire 800 external drive problems

I recently upgraded from a MacBook Pro 17" early 2011 to a MacBook Pro Retina 15" (early 2013).  I have a Drobo and two Seagate 4TB external drives, all connected via Firewire 800.  So, I added a Thunderbolt to Firewire 800 adapter and, it seemed, life was good.
I keep my large iTunes Movie and TV show collection on the Drobo.  Since transitioning to the new MacBook, I have had a number of issue with watching movies on my Apple TV 3.  Randomly, and periodically, the movie appears to be corrupted - the audio track skips/loops and the image is horrible macroblocked, as if the file is damaged.  When I check the movies on the Drobo, opening it with Quicktime on the MBP, it plays just fine at the same spot it appeared damaged on the Apple TV 3.
A second symptom is this: I can no longer re-encode video with Handbrake with the source and target files on the Drobo - it gets some portion of the way through and it just stops, leaving the video partially encoded; again, at random locations/offsets into the video and not the same spot twice.
My initial thought is that connection to the Drobo is dropping out and coming back, on its own, but long enough to cause the above problems.
Is anyone else seeing this issue or something related when using the Thunderbolt to Firewire 800 adapter with large drives?
Thanks, in advance.

Update: I exchanged the Thunderbolt to Firewire adapter and the issue persists. I have a Drobo that I used with my previous system, a PowerMac G5, and never had any issues like this.
It does not matter what software I use. But at some point video playback will suddenly become garbled. If I start the video from the beginning, sometimes the garbled video will start sooner but never later. A restart temporarily resolves the issue. If I copy the file to the local hard drive the video will play back garbled. This is indeed a very strange issue. The issue behaves like a bandwidth bottleneck.
I was having this issue prior to upgrading to Mavericks.
Fred K
iMac (Late 2012), 3.4 GHz i7, GTX 680MX, Fusion Drive, 24 GB RAM, Drobo (Firewire via Thunderbolt)

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