Finder doesn't display files on external hard drives

Hello-
I have two external hard drives and recently I've been moving a ton of data around.
Once two days ago and now again today, the files on those hard drives did not appear in the finder window. Searches yeilded results in that window fine, but the window was blank upon opening.
Two days ago I addressed it with a disk repair. I'm not sure that's what did it though. This appears to be a finder problem.
Earlier I had the same problem. It's nothing to do with the disks; when going to info, it shows the data is all there and searches yield results. But when backing out of the results, the finder window would again be blank.
I have tried: Restarting, starting in safe mode and running disk repairs on the disks, relaunching finder about a hundred times, logging out and back in, clicking on the window and selecting view options, then fiddling with them (this may have corrected the issue on the disk with less data on it, but then again, it might have been coincidence, but the files on that one showed up just then).
Just as I typed this, the beach ball showed up, the window hitched a couple of times, and lo, all my files appeared again.
What appears to be happening, is that Finder is hanging up. I hypothesize this because I tried to eject the disk and coudln't because the error message said Finder was busy with it. Yet Finder wasn't showing my files. That suggests that Finder was balking. The disks were fine, the data is there, it's just that Finder wouldn't show it. Yet when I waited several minutes, the files appeared,suggesting Finder was merely running very slowly or otherwise suboptimally.
Is there anyway to run a repair on Finder itself? This problem is recurrant.

I don't think it's your finder, it is the speed of your hard drive reading those files on the drive. When you try to access the hard drive take a look at the bottom right corner you will see a spinning icon it will continue until it has read the drive. Normally you should wait for that to stop then you should see the data.

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