Spinning beach ball after hard drive upgrade

Im running a macbook pro i7 2.2ghz  8gb ram  version 10.6.8 SL
I recently upgraded my 128gb ssd to a 512gb ssd drive.  I cloned the drive to new drive and ever since then, I get the spinning beach ball very often whereas I never got it prior to the hard drive upgrade.  Is there anything I can check or do to eliminate the freeze ups?  It is VERY annoying.  Or do I just need to do a fresh install on the new hard drive.
thanks in advance

Did you properly prep the drive first:
Drive Preparation
1.  Boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button.  When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
If you are preparing an external or a non-startup drive, then open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area.  If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing.  SMART info will not be reported  on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (for Intel Macs) or APM (for PPC Macs) then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.

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