"moving item to trash" very slow when deleting from second internal HDD

So I have a Mid 2012 non-retina 15" Macbook Pro (2.3Ghz, 8Gig RAM). I replaced the optical drive with an SSD using OWC's Data Doubler. The SSD in the optical bay contains Mac OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 and all my apps, the HDD in the original hard drive bay contains all my music, photos, and movies. Everything runs like a dream except for one problem - when deleting files off my HDD I get the message "preparing to move to trash" and it hangs for like more than a minute and ktext in Activity Monitor goes nuts. I've narrowed it down to an indexing problem because if I go into Spotlight preferences and add my HDD to privacy (i.e. have spotlight ignore that drive) then the hanging while moving to trash issue disappears. The problem is that when that drive is excluded from Spotlight I can't conduct a search for any files on that drive. I'm a DJ and I have about 35,000 songs on the HDD so being able to use Spotlight to find a song is kinda important. From what I can gather I think the following is going on - when deleting a file Spotlight has to modify its index to reflect that the file is no longer there. But why is this such a CPU intensive task??? Moving files between the SSD and the HDD is no problem but everything goes haywire when moving a file from the HDD to the trash. One thing I should mention: if I drag file from my HDD to the desktop (i.e. move it from the HDD to the SSD), it makes a duplicate of the original file (because it's copying from the HDD to the SSD) - no problem there. But if move the original file from the HDD to the Trash and empty the Trash and then go to move the copy of of that file from the desktop (SSD) to the Trash I'll get the message "preparing to move 2 items to the trash" even though it's just one file and the original from the HDD has already been deleted. What the ****?

So in short, why is Spotlight having such a hard time changing the index of one measly file being moved to the Trash just because it's from my second internal drive, and what can I do to fix it?

I think you are correct in that it is an indexing problem. You have two internal drives, if you were using one external drive and one internal drive you would probably not encounter these problems because the external has a different volume title. In your case I assume both SSD and HDD volumes are seperate, like partitions on the Macintosh HD. I can think of no way to fix your problem other than to suggest you place your media on an external HD. As it is you have an effective work around time consuming as it may be.
At the end of the day what you have done (storage wise) is a creative modification but not how the MBP was designed to function and like all stop gap methods it has it's drawbacks.
Others in this forum may have other suggestions.
You did not mention how much total storage you now have or what OS you are using.
Also what configuration did you use when installing the Data Doubler SSD?
Did you use the SPAN setup to combine the two drives or as an individual drive? I am by no means an expert on this hardware but I thought there were a couple of ways of setting the configuration. I'm only guessing but if spotlight were to see both drives as one it may solve your problem.

Thanks for your response Rod Yes, you are correct, both SSD and HDD volumes are separate as if they were two partitions. Unfortunately placing my media on an external drive isn't really a path I'd like to go down and would sort of defeat the purpose of me having the Data Doubler setup - I like having everything contained within my MacBook. I use my MacBook for DJing and using an external drive to store my music puts one more thing in the chain that could go wrong. By the way, as a workaround I turn off Spotlight on my HDD media drive and use an app called "Find Any File" when I need to search on that drive.

By the way, the SSD is 250GB and the HDD is 1TB, and I'm running OS X Yosemite 10.10.3. I didn't use any configuration when setting it up - I simply put the OS and all the apps on the SSD, and all my media on the HDD. One reason I used this configuration is so that my apps would run smoothly (including my DJ software) and my music and media files (which aren't accessed as much and don't really need the speed of an SSD) would remain separate and in one place. I have heard of RAID configurations but I'm not familiar with SPAN. I will do some research on SPAN (thanks for pointing me in the right direction) and see if it's a viable option. Thanks man

Thanks, a bit of searching turned up this bit of info, note the SPAN reference:

Just a few of the configuration options you can enjoy with Data Doubler:
Creating an individual volume with its own desktop icon.
Combining a new drive with the existing internal drive for one larger volume (SPAN).
Combining a new matching drive with existing internal for high-performance RAID-0 Stripe volume.
Configuring a new drive as a Time Machine®
backup drive.
Formatting one drive for the Mac OS and the other dedicated for Windows.

I found this here but no instructions, poss available from OWC?
OWC Data Doubler: Now 2 Drives in 2008 or Later MacBook & MacBook Pro
Hope that helps.

Thanks Rod. Actually, as I type this from my backup MacBook I'm transferring all my music over to my main MacBook's newly created DIY fusion drive! I already transferred OS X, apps etc. to the fusion drives and that worked great. As soon as my music finishes transferring over I'll see if creating the fusion drive fixed the problem and I'll report my findings (fingers crossed.) I hope it works because I really like the idea of everything being on one (virtual) drive and being able to search for everything easily.

Rod, you said:

You have two internal drives, if you were using one external drive and one internal drive you would probably not encounter these problems because the external has a different volume title.

Click to expand...

I have two internal drives and don't have any problems at all. Each has a different volume title (Macintosh SSD and Internal HD, in my case). I don't think you can have two internals with the same name anyway, so if that's true, then that really doesn't have any impact. I store media on the drive in the optical bay (Internal HD), boot and keep everything else on the main drive (Macintosh SSD). There must have been something else going on in Dizzyrocks2001's machine. Fusion is ok, but backup, backup, backup! If either of the components in a fused drive fails, you lose everything on both of them!

Update: I tried the Fusion drive thing and it didn't solve the problem. So I've narrowed down what the problem is - OS X doesn't play nice when it comes to indexing large folders.... period. I keep all my mp3s in one big "Music" folder which contains about 33,000 songs. I made a smaller folder on the same drive with about 100 songs and there were no problems at all, but as soon as I tried moving anything around in the big folder I had major slow downs. BUT when I tell Spotlight to ignore the big folder then everything works fine. So until Apple figures out a way to index big folders more efficiently then I'm stuck with telling Spotlight to ignore the big folder.

OK, thanks for the feedback. That certainly is a large folder. Maybe some sub folders would help. So now you have a sort of fusion drive, I do hope you have a backup as mentioned, it would be a tragedy to loose all that hard work.
Best regards,
Rod

Rod Sprague said:

OK, thanks for the feedback. That certainly is a large folder. Maybe some sub folders would help. So now you have a sort of fusion drive, I do hope you have a backup as mentioned, it would be a tragedy to loose all that hard work.
Best regards,
Rod

Click to expand...

Unfortunately the DJ software I use doesn't play nice with a lot of subfolders. I have 3 backups - one backup MacBook and 2 external hard drives kept in a fireproof safe. I'm hardcore when it comes to backing up so if the fusion drive fails then I'm covered 3 times over My music library is the culmination of 8 years of work, tweaking, buying and organizing. If I lost my data I'd jump off a cliff lol.

Anyways, thanks for all your help Rod

Update: since my last post I decided to start from scratch by wiping my SSD clean and reinstalling OS X and all my apps. I also erased my HDD (the one that contained all my music) and reloaded everything back on. This seems to pretty much have fixed the problem I had with music files from "the big music folder" being slow to delete and move around. There's a little bit of lag (which is to be expected when one folder has 33,000 mp3s in it) but I no longer get the lingering "preparing to move items to trash" message. And when I say "lag" I mean about 1 second when moving or trashing a file, as opposed to the 1-2 minutes I was experiencing before, so this is great!

Moving forward, should I be using something like Onyx to maintain the clean state of my MacBook? Or will my MacBook eventually get sluggish again over time? I'd prefer not to have to wipe my MacBook clean and reinstall everything if possible.

I whole-heartedly recommend Onyx to maintain the health of any and all hard drives. Along with smart computing, Onyx will help keep your Mac in tip-top shape. I think 99% of Mac Forum members will concur to that.

Dogbreath said:

I whole-heartedly recommend Onyx to maintain the health of any and all hard drives. Along with smart computing, Onyx will help keep your Mac in tip-top shape. I think 99% of Mac Forum members will concur to that.

Click to expand...

Ok, thanks, I'll give it a try