I hate, hate, hate when I fix something and I don’t know why the fix worked (or what the fix even was…). I want my suffering to result in something learned so it doesn’t happen again.

is it the fault of my 15 year old amd fx cpu, or is it linux? I have a gtx 6700

It’s your CPU. If you are up for purchasing new hardware, a Ryzen processor (5000 series or better) will be a massive upgrade and are very prevalent on the used market.

For an external drive? I guess I have never experienced that since external drives are already pretty slow.

Yeah, you will generally have a better time with exFAT, which is a format both Windows and Linux works with well. All my external drives get formatted as such.