Search extremely slow on laptop

Am I doing something wrong?

For some reason, searhes have become painfully slow when done on my macbook pro when not connected to the external drive that holds the media.

This did not used to be the case...speed was about the same whether connected or not.

Running MP 1.0.1.50536 on year old MBP with 8gb ram and SSD (so it should be pretty fast) and OS X 10.6.8

I have about 121,000 images in catalog... Searches in about 1min when connected, 3-4 minutes when not connected.

Is there some setting that can fix this?

Thanks

Tom