Hard drive goes crazy for 60 seconds after iPhoto starts up

When I launch iPhoto 08 v7.1 (347) with a library of 1500 photos (about 2.5GB), my photos appear in about 3 seconds. But then my hard drive does a alot of reading/writing for 60 seconds straight. This hard disk churning happens every time I start up iPhoto 08. I don't recall this happening in iPhoto 6. I have a plenty of free RAM and hard drive space, and the CPU is barely utilized. I can do stuff in iPhoto while the hard disk is churning, so what is iPhoto doing in the background?
Has anyone else experienced this?

I figured out why mds was running so long. I have an external firewire drive connected to back up my internal MBP drive periodically. I had disabled* Spotlight indexing on the partition that backs up my boot volume since I never needed to search there.
Apparently, Spotlight indexing must be enabled on any connected boot volume. So I re-enabled spotlight indexing and dragged the volume to the privacy pane in the Spotlight preferences so it wouldn't actually index anything even though it was enabled.
When launching iPhoto now, mds only spikes for a second, which is what I would expect as normal behavior. I tested this several times to be sure.
Bottom line, if mds is running unusually long when iPhoto launches, make sure all boot volumes, internal or external, have Spotlight indexing enabled. I don't understand why this is the case, but it is.
*Note: disabling/enabling spotlight indexing on a volume can be done through terminal commands or third party tools.

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