Firewire 800 external drive problems

[Chuckk1]

I recently purchased a Mercury Elite Firewire 800 external drive on the advice of a friend who said I was nuts doing audio with any drive other than one using the OXFORD 911 chipset. I currently use a MAC G4-350 (sawtooth) with half a GIG of RAM and 3 internal ATA/IDE drives, running OS9.1. I have been using one external QUE 120 GIG Firewire 400 drive (which has performed flawlessly). The instructions with the Elite said it would work fine with the 400 protocol - that it would simply default to 400. I connected the Elite via a 400 cable to the "thru" port of the QUE drive. I tried recording some audio with Digital Performer (2.7), and about 20 seconds into the pass, the recording stopped, and the screen froze. I rebooted and then tried simply transfering a file from the QUE to the Elite. About 10 seconds into the transfer, same thing - froze.
Ran Disc Warrior on the Elite and then rebooted. Now file transfer works, but recording live audio still crashes. Help...........