Photos running slow with library on external drive

Using MacBook Air (M1, 2020), since my Photos Library was too big to transfer (300GB) I moved the library from my previous computer to a brand new Lacie Rugged 2T HDD drive which was set up as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

I am able to access and view the Library, however it is very laggy when making any edits to the photos or even just trying to drag a photo to an album - at least a 10 sec ~ 1 min+ hang.

Per a previous post I tried running Etre check to get further insight, I am not able to discern if there is anything useful but this was the issue that it called out:

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Runaway process A process is using a large percentage of your CPU.

Top Processes Snapshot by CPU:

    Process (count) CPU (Source - Location)

    Other processes 81.00 % (?)

    DiskSpeedTest 0.32 % (App Store)

    EtreCheck 0.23 % (App Store)

    Finder 0.09 % (Apple)

    Photos 0.02 % (Apple)

Top Processes Snapshot by Memory:

    Process (count) RAM usage (Source - Location)

    EtreCheck 294 MB (App Store)

    Photos 161 MB (Apple)

    Toolkit 96 MB (Seagate Technologies LLC)

    corespotlightd 93 MB (Apple)

    AppleSpell 84 MB (Apple)

Top Processes Snapshot by Network Use:

    Process Input / Output (Source - Location)

    Other processes 6 MB / 2 MB (?)

    spindump_agent 0 B / 0 B (Apple)

    backgroundtaskmanagementagent 0 B / 0 B (Apple)

    UsageTrackingAgent 0 B / 0 B (Apple)

    SafariBookmarksSyncAgent 0 B / 0 B (Apple)

Virtual Memory Information:

    Physical RAM: 8 GB

    Free RAM: 19 MB

    Used RAM: 7.63 GB

    Cached files: 361 MB

    Available RAM: 380 MB

    Swap Used: 488 MB

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If anyone has any thoughts or suggestions on what might be causing the lag and how to resolve it would be appreciated.