USB External Drive Access and Spinning Beachball Crash

Over the last month that I have had my MacBook, the machine has experienced five spinning beachball crashes forcing me to manually power it down. First, the application I'm using freezes with the spinning beachball. Then, progressively other apps on the machine also lock up, where cmd-opt-esc and Dock-based force quitting do not respond. Eventually, the whole machine locks up, forcing me to hold down the power button to reboot.
I have been trying to figure out the pattern. It has happened once in OpenOffice.org, three times in TeXShop and once in Safari. I think the pattern across the five episodes is that the machine was trying to access my external USB hard drive to save a file (saving an already-open document in OpenOffice.org and TeXShop and printing a web page to a PDF document in Safari).
The drive is a Lacie 60GB USB drive, formatted AppleHFS, MacOS extended (journaled). Verification with the Disk Utility checks out fine, and I have in fact recently reformatted it to make sure.
I think the crashing problem is also related to this Console message, which recurs periodically:
Jul 3 10:26:21 MK-MBCD kernel[0]: jnl: flushing fs disk buffer returned 0x5
I use the drive with my iMac G5 as well, where I have experienced no similar problems.
I would appreciate any feedback on how to troubleshoot this problem.
MacBook Core Duo / iMac G5 (iSight)   Mac OS X (10.4.7)  

Thank you for your reply!
The Lacie drive did come with a second USB cable to provide additional power. I don't know how you feel about those as opposed to power adaptors to provide additional power. The USB power cable is at my work, so I will have to wait until I go in to grab it and try.
For now, I've done what Lacie support told me to do. From my description they suspected data corruption. So, I have reformatted the drive. In the process, I have turned off the journaling on the drive. That appears to have at least stopped the repeated console message about journaling failure.
Have you heard if MacBooks' USB ports are more underpowered than PowerBook G4s'? I use the same Lacie drive with my PowerBook with no additional power without any problems until I got the MacBook...
Thank you again for your help!

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