I beat the Beachballs.....but.....

Immediately after booting into Mountain Lion for the first time, I began having problems. My MacBook Pro was crippled.

Stalls. Freezes. Hangs. And tons of spinning beach balls.

A finder window could take more than a minute to open. Switching between applications could take another minute. QuickTime files would not play for more than a few seconds without freezing for minutes at a time.

I tried lots of things, but here is the short answer. Mountain Lion would not play nice with my upgraded hard drive. I cloned my expanded hard drive back to the original Mac factory-installed hard drive. Now both drives have exactly the same software and files. Then I re-installed the original factory drive. Poof! Immediately my problems were over.

Now, I would like to go back to my expanded hard drive, or purchase a new one that will work in my MacBook.

I'm asking for help.

So here's a little more detail.

I have a Mid 2009 MacBook Pro 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. It shipped with a 250 GB hard drive. After year or so I purchased a 640 GB hard drive and installed it. I was running Lion or perhaps a previous version of OSX. No problems.

Then I purchased a 1 TB hard drive, cloned all my files to it and installed it. Beachball city! So I went back to the 640 GB hard drive and have had no problems with it till now.

Along comes Mountain Lion, which cripples my 640 GB drive with beach balls and freezes.

Does anyone have any idea why these expanded drives won't work with Mountain Lion? Are there some that do work?

Here is the specific information on the various drives in question.

1) Factory shipped, Apple logo drive: 250 GB Hitachi 5K500 B-250 5400 RPM.

2) 640 GB drive that worked just fine until I installed Mountain Lion: 640GB 2.5" Seagate Momentus 5400RPM 8MB Cache SATA 9.5mm Serial Number: 5WX0KYZ6 Part Number: 9RN134-500 Model Number: ST9640320AS Family: MOMENTUS 5400.7 FAMILY No firmware upgrade available.

3) 1 TB drive that never worked without stalls and hangs: 1.0TB 2.5" Samsung Spinpoint MT2 5400RPM 12.5mm SATA Notebook Drive w/8MB Cache

Thanks for reading. Thanks for any insight.