External Hard Drive slowing down computer

[R.R.Mac]

I have an external hard Drive and every time i put it into my computer, my computer freezes for about 10 seconds and it seems to keep reading data off my hard drive even if I have nothing related to do with it. I.e. using only safari and my hard drive is slaving away. Then my computer is a lot slower until I take the hard drive out.

Is there anything I can do to reduce the speed lost. I have 1GB ram and 2.2 GHZ black Macbook so it should not affect its preformance.

Thanks

 

[mkrishnan]

There's going to be some pause when the drive first gets mounted, although ten seconds sounds slightly excessive.

If it's also slow after that, my first guess is that your Mac is trying to create a Spotlight index for it.... See heah:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1545490&tstart=60