Hey, there. I'm running a Raspibolt node.
Tor is very rarely the problem with slow syncing. It's either failing to find peers, or there is lack of memory. But before that, is your external drive an HDD? If that's so, then expect slow syncing. When I finished syncing a couple of years ago, I think it had taken me around 2 weeks, because of that. So, maybe you should shut down everything, move your blocks and chainstate in an SSD, let it sync there, and then move these directories back to your HDD drive.
Hey man thanks for replying. I am using a 1TB Samsung T7 external SSD and tested the SSD and got about 350 mb/s. The SSD is connected to the blue USB port in the pi 4. Btw I am using Bullseye as per the guide. Apparently tried with Bookworm and there were permission issues that I couldn't resolve.