External HDD taking a long time to load!!

[combine]

hey guys, currently using a mid 09 13" Macbook Pro with 4gb of ram. Currently i have a Western Digital 1TB My Book External Hard Drive connected to the usb port.

But everytime i try to access the ext hdd, there will be the dreaded beach ball ands takes around 3-5mins before the files can be displayed on finder.

I never had this problem when it is plugged into my windows PC. My ext hard disk is currently formated in NTFS, im accessing the files through my mac using NTFS-3G. Could this be a reason?

 

[Snowbound]

Yes. I would bet money it's related to that, at least. Is there any particular reason that you need to have it NTFS?

 

[combine]

not really, the reason why i did not format it to HFS+ is because there are like 500gb of data to be backed up if its gonna be reformatted

 

[geoffreak]

NTFS-3G is a VERY slow system. Uninstall it and download MacFUSE instead. You don't need to reformat your disk.
If this doesn't fix the slowness, there is something wrong with your hard drive.

 

[combine]

NTFS-3G is a VERY slow system. Uninstall it and download MacFUSE instead. You don't need to reformat your disk.
If this doesn't fix the slowness, there is something wrong with your hard drive.

ok I have uninstalled NTFS-3G and installed macFUSE. the performance increased greatly!

but.. now i can't remove files from my ext HDD is that normal? sorry for asking such a noob question, new to the mac os scene

 

[geoffreak]

You can't delete them at all? Have you tried clicking on the file you want to delete and hitting Command + Delete?