Slow External HD Booting

I have a White Macbook, the recent one that came out. I have a WD passport 500GB.

It's not until recently, today actually, that my External HD seemed to be acting so slowly. I would click on a folder and the contents inside the folder seemed to take minutes just to show up; an action that took less than a second to perform. This was also the same for throwing out files in the hard drive.

Now whenever I try moving something into the folder such as a video file, the action would take a vast amount of time. In fact I spent 3 minutes or so looking at the progress bar being stuck at "preparing to copy file" until it finally began copying.

I looked up slow hard drives before and the support section of the Apple site said that it could be related to the number of icons or comments on each icon. I tried their recommended solution of holding command and option during start up and it made no difference.

The external Hard drive was also my time machine backup disk, and after I performed the "hold command and option on start up" operation, the hard drive no longer shows up in the Finder Window and only on the desktop.

Any help would be appreciated thank you.

iggyflashbulb said:

The external Hard drive was also my time machine backup disk, and after I performed the "hold command and option on start up" operation, the hard drive no longer shows up in the Finder Window and only on the desktop.

Any help would be appreciated thank you.

Click to expand...

You can select what shows up in Finder windows by selecting Finder and then go to Finder preferences and check what you want to show up