Hard drive keep spinning after replacement

[Hei]

Hi guys,

I recently replace my stock hard drive in my 2009 MBP 13" with a WD Scorpio Black 320 GB. After I put my hard drive in, I notice the hard drive keep working even though I'm not doing anything. In the activity monitor, I can see it has a read and write speed of about 5 to 20 MB/s and that the process "mdworker" is running at about 20%. I know that mdworker is use for spotlight indexing, but since I used carbon copy cloner to transfer all my data, I shouldn't need to index it again, so I am worry it's doing something weird.

Also, I notice that my boot drive takes significantly longer (1:15 vs 0:50) with the new 7200 rpm drive, which doesn't make sense to me. Do you guys have any idea what's going on?

 

[wpotere]

Just because you are not doing anything doesn't mean the computer isn't busy. Read/Writes to the swap slice happen all the time and it is very normal. Mdworker is likely indexing and re-indexing to keep things up to date.

 

[ECUpirate44]

Your HDD is spinning because your computer is on. Your computer is completing tons of processes under the hood.

 

[Hei]

I certainly can understand the hard drive reading and writing in the order of kB/s when I am not doing anything, but I am talking about data over 10 MB/s, which I don't think is normal. Anyway, I guess I will wait until mdworker is done to get back to normal.

However, my other problem is that the boot time is significantly longer for my new 7200 rpm drive compare to my old 5400 rpm drive. I expect the new drive to be faster especially everything is the same since I carbon copied it. Any idea what might cause that?

 

[Bathplug]

In comparison to your old drive then this sounds odd with it being slower. Also it might just be a generally noisier drive. Also 5,400 rpm drives these days are often called green drives which run cooler & quieter and the 7,200rpm drives can be louder depending on the brand. Any chance you could try the drive in an external enclosure as an external hard drive to see if it keeps overly spinning/noisy? Or do a fresh install on the drive and not run off your carbon copy data then compare the performance?