Pro Tools Error 9073 Conundrum

Hi Everybody!

Two weeks ago I got this error during a Pro Tools session out of nowhere:

DAE can't get audio from the drive fast enough. Your drive may be too slow or fragmented, or a firewire drive could be having trouble due to the extra firewire bandwidth or CPU load. (-9073)

I clicked OK and Pro Tools freezed, forcing me to reboot my computer manually. After experiencing the same problem several times my external hard drive (a G-Tech, from which I had been working off of) stopped mounting all together (file structure glitch-related i think)

It would mount once a day and finally yesterday I was able to successfully reformat (erase) the entire G-Tech drive getting it to mount normally once again. I then copied back all my sessions from my backup drive...

HOWEVER, upon opening a different session I got the SAME ERROR 9073 after a minute of playback. Froze and I had to reboot. Happened a few more times and now my G-Tech external hard drive once again refuses to mount at all!

Since this all began, I have verified/repaired the disk and disk permissions of my system drive and have successfully used my backup drive to finish a session. So it appears the problem is related to the G-Tech drive. I was told its probably file structure related but it still happens after I reformatted. Also, G-Tech told me they usually don't have problems with the controllers in their drives so removing the drive out of its enclosure probably wouldn't help.

I'm stumped. I noticed everyone seems to have different experiences with the error 9073. Any ideas come to mind? Your help would be highly appreciated--Thank you for your time.

These are my System Details:

Apple MacBook Pro

Mac OSX 10.4.11

Mbox 2 mini

Pro Tools LE 7.3.1

G-Tech G-Drive FireWire800