large projects causing FCP to freeze when opened

Starting yesterday afternoon, when I open up large project files (about 80-110 MB) I get the spinning beach ball of death after being asked to reconnect.

I tried checking Console, but I couldn't find anything there.

Just to reiterate, I've never had problems having large project open until now. I've had two or three 100+ MBs projects open at a time in the recent past.

Since I've been working in a different location, the differences between this and my normal setup are the hard drives (I had been using a single 1TB drive, now the media is spread across four LaCies) and no external monitor.

Files below 100 mb shouldn't be that much of a problem. Above a hundred mbs, wouldn't be so advisable, but someone else should do better to give word on file sizes.

Are those drives daisy chained? Getting the spinning beachball on reconnecting files would possibly mean that the mac is unable to reach the stored media properly. How fast is the machine, how fast is the connection, how fast is the drive, what kind of connection, what version of final cut and OS?

Yes, the drives were daisy chained, but as it turned out it was one bad drive. I ended up putting the media that I needed on another drive and everything worked out fine.

The drive in question was a LaCie d2 300GB firewire 800. The other specifics you asked for, which don't seem to be the problem, are a MacBook Pro 2.16 GHz with 2 GB of RAM (OS 10.4) running FCP 6.0.2.

At some point I'd like to figure out what was wrong with the drive, but it's not critical.