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hard drive - My terminal and filesystem are hanging on MacOS

So I have had an external hard drive connected to my laptop, and have been writing millions of files to the external hard drive. One directory even has over 2 million folders at the first level deep.


Probably a dozen times my computer has frozen up. I have about 50+ windowed applications opened and every now and then my screen gets that nintendo glitch look to it where everything turns to lines and shakes. The glitching part doesn't cause the freezing, but something is causing it. When it freezes the spinner goes on forever and I have to press the power button to shut it off.


I leave it shut off for at least 15 seconds before turning it on again. When I start again, it gives me back all my windows as they were, except the terminal windows aren't in the right spot anymore, they're just at the home directory.


I say all this because now I can't even type ls inside /Volumes, it just hangs. I tried hard unplugging the hard drive and plugging it back in. It registers in the finder window as being present, but I simply can't do ls /Volumes. I can't cd /Volumes either. I can't go into the hard drive. This only started happening after I've been writing millions of files to it.


It's a Western Digital external hard drive.


Oh wait! There now ls has finally completed. It took about 10 minutes for it to register fully. Hmm... Wondering if you guys might know why it's doing this. Why it's not letting me get into the drive until long time.


So okay, now I just started writing more files. It let me write a few thousand more but now it's hanging again. In these cases I can't CTRL+C or CTRL+D to get out of the process, I have to open the Activity Monitor and Force Quit. But then it's back to I can't ls in the /Volumes. Wondering what the heck is going on.


I have also been typically running 3-5 processes all writing files in parallel.

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