Games loading too slow since March 15th update

Since the March 15th update for Xbox Series X, most of my games are taking way too long to load. Sometimes upwards of 5 minutes when before the update they were taking only a few seconds. I noticed the issue first with Lego Marvel 2 where it was taking so long to load it was showing loading screens I had never seen before [presumably since the Series X was loading them so fast]. So I tried Star Wars Battlefront 2 since that game is notoriously slow to load but was pretty fast in general on the Series X but now it's loading slower than it did on the OG Xbox One. Elder Scrolls online now has lag and FPS drop as it starts up with the intro screens seeming to freeze. If I wait long enough everything will load and play fine.

It happens *almost* every time I try to load these days, randomly sometimes however they will load correctly and very quickly as they did before. Now at first I thought it was my external hard drive failing, but after moving games from my external HDD to internal, and also trying it on a separate other external HDD the issues are hit and miss and don't seem to be caused by the hard drives. Sometimes I had more success on the second external drive, sometimes not. Most of the time worked on internal drive but sometimes they'd go back to loading real slow even on internal.

So I'm really not sure what's happening but everything seemed to work fine before the update on March 15th. I should add, at first I was pretty convinced it was my external HDD. I plugged it into my pc and ran seagates tolls to test the drive and all tests past. I then put it back on the xbox and reformatted it and moved just the games I was testing onto it, and it seemed to work fine. So I moved everything back over to it, leaving ESO on the internal drive so I could log into my daily things...but sure enough not only did ESO not load quickly and lagged/fps dropped again on the internal drive, but lego marvel 2 on the external loaded slow....shut it down for the day...next day turned it on and tried those games and they worked fine...then today started things up and everythings slow again. It's maddening.

Anyone have any insights on what I can do? Anyone else having this problem? Should I just wait for the next Xbox Series X system update and hope it fixes things? Should I try for a 3rd time moving things to a second separate hard drive? Should I cover the whole thing in ketchup and eat it out of frustration?

Thanks for any help or suggestions anyone can provide.

:)