Seagate Freeagent 500gb media skipping

hello

i have recently purchased a 500 gig freeagent external drive to use with my mac mini, pretty much the sole purpose of me buying the drive was was storing and playing my extensive itunes library.

The drive stores the files fine but play back is dodgy as heck. at seemingly random intervals, anything from 5 minutes to 30 seconds, music will just cut out. I know for a fact the files aren't corrupted. I'v read simularish things on other forums like sleep problems ect. and have turned off the hard drive sleep mode option in system prefs.

has anyone got any idea as to a fix?
cheers

play the same track again, does it skip forward at the same time, and were the tracks downloaded from the itunes store or ripped into Itunes from CD

all either ripped off cd's or downloaded from other internet sources like napster and a few old russian sites. the pauses are random and it's almost like the drive has to power back up and start spinning again before play continues.

any ideas anyone??

Have you tried playing music from a more legitimate venue such as a store bought cd or itunes? And does that skip? Why I'm asking as some people I know have issues with downloaded music from some places, won't play properly for them. But music from other places seem to work.

Also 2 more things:

Have you done a scan on the hard drive to see if there is a problem with it somewhere? With Disk Utility or Onyx or something similar.

Also have you tried copying a huge file to it? You can delete it straight after. But if that wasn't smooth then that might also indicate an issue.

yes a lot of the music is legit, i know for a fact the music files are not corrupt because i can transfer them to an ipod and they're fine

anyone?