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My 27" i7 iMac 2011 with 8GB RAM needed 5 min. to show me my iMovie events (5GB). Some weird HDD issue. I returned it. My 1.4GHz Macbook Air with 2GB RAM and 128GB flash storage did the same procedure in a few seconds.
Spotlight was NOT the reason. No other CPU or HDD intensive processes were running.....
I guess an SSD could solve this issue.
 
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