I'll take a bit of a wild guess: Perhaps there was a connection issue or drive failure that resulted in performance hits when trying to read/write data. Like OS tries to write file, drive doesn't...
I'll take a bit of a wild guess:
Perhaps there was a connection issue or drive failure that resulted in performance hits when trying to read/write data. Like OS tries to write file, drive doesn't confirm write, so OS tries again.
This sort of thing definitely happens if there's connectivity issues between a SAN and a server, so it seems plausible that the same could happen on an external HD.
Worth adding explicitly that this is a reasonably good sign that you should stop using that drive entirely - if it's causing weird errors and slowdowns now, there's a strong chance it'll fail...
Worth adding explicitly that this is a reasonably good sign that you should stop using that drive entirely - if it's causing weird errors and slowdowns now, there's a strong chance it'll fail completely and take the data with it some time soon.
Did you have photos on that external drive? It's possible your mac was trying to index them for the iCloud photo library but something like a bad sector or some sort of formatting issue kept it...
Did you have photos on that external drive? It's possible your mac was trying to index them for the iCloud photo library but something like a bad sector or some sort of formatting issue kept it from being able to complete the index so it just kept trying over and over again.
I'll take a bit of a wild guess:
Perhaps there was a connection issue or drive failure that resulted in performance hits when trying to read/write data. Like OS tries to write file, drive doesn't confirm write, so OS tries again.
This sort of thing definitely happens if there's connectivity issues between a SAN and a server, so it seems plausible that the same could happen on an external HD.
Worth adding explicitly that this is a reasonably good sign that you should stop using that drive entirely - if it's causing weird errors and slowdowns now, there's a strong chance it'll fail completely and take the data with it some time soon.
Did you have photos on that external drive? It's possible your mac was trying to index them for the iCloud photo library but something like a bad sector or some sort of formatting issue kept it from being able to complete the index so it just kept trying over and over again.