Finder slow or frozen while connecting HD (10.8.4 on SSD)
Disable the Spotlight for the folders and or drive in question.
That should speed things up.

Or you can try to completely disable spotlight to see if that was the problem

Go to your Terminal and paste this

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist


Once satisfied you can enable the spotlight

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist