Programs and music running off my external hard drive keep freezing and unfreezing

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So I installled a 120 GB Vertex 3 SATA III Gbps as the main drive and replaced my superdrive with a 750GB 7200RPM hard drive for extra storage. I also have a 8GB DDR3 memory. All is great but I seemed to notice that any programs running off of my external storage device (music - itunes and Call of Duty modern warfare 4 etc) keeps freezing. Sometimes it unfreezes and starts playing the music or game again but sometimes it takes a little while for it to unfreeeze. E.g. when I play music it randomly stops and then then starts playing again. Its really annoying as I can never get a smooth playtime with either games or listening to music. Also when it's stopped, if I click on the itunes the rainbow whirling icon pops up.
Anybody have any advice??
 

chscag

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How about some specs for your Mac? You stated external drive, but are you referring to the 750 GB drive you added in the superdrive bay or another external drive? Because, running graphic intensive games from an external drive is not recommended. Even if the drive is attached via FW800 some games will still lag.
 
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The basic specs are 2.2 GHz, i7 quad core processor, DMI 5 GT/s, running the latest Lion OS X 10.7.4 with a AMD Radeon HD 6750M 1024 MB graphics card.

Oh I see. Okay well gaming I can understand, but what about my itunes and music?

Thanks so much!:D
 

chscag

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Oh I see. Okay well gaming I can understand, but what about my itunes and music?

Running the iTunes library (and playing music) from an external drive should be OK. There may be something else going on if you're getting lag when playing music.
 

chscag

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The only thing I can suggest is to run verify and repair from Disk Utility to see if there are any errors on the drive.
 
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When I verified the disk it said "Mactintosh HD 2 seems to be okay" but when I tried to repair it the message "Couldn't unmount disk" popped up. What exactly does that mean?
 

chscag

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Since you were running Disk Utility from the disk you were verifying, it has to be unmounted first in order to repair it. The easiest way to do that is to use your recovery boot DVD to boot the machine and do the repairs from Disk Utility located on the DVD.
 

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