Accessing external SSDs getting slower as OS's progress

[Kryten]

My iMac (Full info below), has two Samsung Pro SSD's and a 2.5" HD (Time Machine) attached via a USB 3.1 Gen2 hub. Under Big Sur the speeds were great, after upgrading to Monterey, a delay of about 2 seconds on my Work SSD, now I've upgraded to Ventura 13.3 it's even slower, around 4 seconds and longer as I search down into clients' folders and artwork. One SSD is my Work drive, the other is Bootcamp and then the TM HD.
Is there anything I can do to speed things up back to Big Sur speed?

(3.8 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i7, AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT 8 GB, 80 GB 2133 MHz DDR4)

Oh yes and still NO .eps preview, the usual work around hasn't worked for me.

Appreciate any suggestions thanks guys.

K.

 

[MacInWin]

How full are the SSDs? Once an SSD gets beyond about 60% full, it slows down. Try to keep the SSDs below 50%, if you can.

How are you measuring the slowdown? What is it you are doing that takes 4+ seconds to accomplish? You mentioned searching, how are you doing that? Could the search be the slow part, not the drives?

Hubs also slow down SSD throughput. Connect directly if you can.

 

[Kryten]

Sorry Jake I was wrong they are connected directly to the iMac, not through a hub. The Work drive is 256Gb capacity with 97Gb used. By searching I meant for instance opening a file from InDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop and having to go through various folder down, as attached. And it's not just Adobe, even with Mail it takes about the same amount of time to add an attachment this far down the hierarchy. In the attached image on my iPhone I timed navigating to folder shown at just under 20 seconds.