OS slowing to the point of freezing when attaching Seagate External SSD

Hi there! Searched around and impimented some suggestions but nothing seems to work.

Running a Mid 2015 iMac Big Sur 11.7.7 and recently plugged in a Seagate esternal SSD. First just the drive. The Mac wasn't recognizing the drive -- at all. So I installed Seagate Dashboard for Mac and Toolkit for Mac. Now we recoginze the drive but as soon as I plug it in my system starts freezing (1 second delays anytime I move the mouse type freezing.)

I can't figure out what it is. First I thought it was one my my apps scanning the 1 TB drive so I ejected and erased the entire drive (900 GB) on another Mac. I formatted the drive ExFAT I believe (but I've erased and reformatted a few times just to see if that was the issue.

Point is I have an empty drive, I've installed the software. Can see the drive. Now I have OS issues. I uninstalled the Seagate software and even manually removed a few files. Same OS lag issues. So I installed th Seagate software again and same thing.

I've disabled any sort of virus scanning or file optimization software I have. It's really just the Mac OS and this empty, unformatted SSD.

No clue what could be causing the conflct. Nothing suspicious in Activity Monitor or Task Manager.

Any help would be appreciated.