The Sims take Forever To Load With external Drive

My sims takes forever to load and lags really badly. I know the problem is my mods, but I thought it would be fine if I added everything to my external hard drive. I bought a harddrive with 4 TB worth of memory and placed the sims on there and have my mods on there as well. But it seems the problem is, my build mode cc (furnishings) always cause my game to load slow and lag. It works fine with my cat cc (traits, clothing, hair, etc.) but whenever I add all of my build mode mods, everything takes a turn for the worst. it takes forever to open, forever to get to the start screen, the former to get to the world, and after that it lags and everything loads so slow, especially in build mode. if I try to search something in build mode it takes like an hour for it load so I can type and another hour to pull up the results. HELP

I have an IMAC with 8gb memory, 500 gb storage, running Ventura 13.0.1 and an M1 chip