Premiere Pro Project no longer importing files: video, audio, or otherwise

[thingfisher]

I've imported around 60% of the footage I have to edit. The files are all 6k and so to prevent running out of space on my main drive, I have an external drive plugged into my PC that is streaming some of the footage. After dragging and dropping and creating proxies, suddenly the import files window would come up and not move at all, even after several hours. I've deleted old media caches and imported the remaining 40% onto my internal drive but still can't put anything new into my project. My other projects work as normal. Any help is much obliged.

PPRO 2023

Nvidia Geforce 2070 Super

Driver Version 526.86

Intel Core i9-9900k CPU @ 3.60GHz

15.92 G's of RAM

I've done both drag-and-drop as well as file>import, but not that new screen, I'll try that next. Is it possible reverting back to 2022 would resolve some of these issues? I never experienced this with similarly sized files prior

[gerikp]

How fast is the read and write speed of your external drive? It might be bottlenecking there.