Degraded performance on using external disk

Question

I am fairly new to MacOS, been using Ubutnu from beginning, i was forced to switch to MacBook for work reason.

My issue is that when i plug in my 2TB WD passport hard disk, macbook sort of dies.Folders start taking more time to open, and if i try opening any specific path which has good amount of data (say > 200gb), i can literally go to kitchen, make lunch and come back before it opens.

Is there something wrong with my MacBook? or some config i should do, to make it behave like an apple product?

My Config:

OS X Yosemite
Version : 10.10.5 (14F27)  
MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015)
2.7 GHz Intel Core i5 
Memory 8 GB 1867 MHz DDR3 
Graphics Intel Iris Graphics 6100 1536 MB

Answer 1

open /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor and watch what's happening.

My bet is that your Mac is indexing the whole drive, which will seriously degrade performance..

another issue can be a damaged directory - the system will try to rebuild if it can..

either issue can slow things down a lot.

IF it's indexing, you can go to Spotlight (in System Preferences) and set it to ignore that drive, which will help quite a bit..

Answer 2

@NoobEditor!

I'm sorry to hear about your issues with the WD Passport drive! :( I'd recommend you to try plugging it with a different USB cable or use a different port on the Mac. I'd also suggest you to go to Disk Utility and test the WD Passport for defects.

If you have access to another computer, I'd also try connecting the external HDD there, just to check how it will get recognize and if it will affect the system performance there.

Hope this helps. Keep us posted!