“Other” storage in Mac 10.9

You're not the first person to have problems with this drive in a Mac - see http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/apple-notebooks/217444-macbook-pro-hard-drive-replacement-wont-format.html

It's possible there is a compatibility issue, as you seem to be doing all the right things (and it is connected properly otherwise you wouldn't see it in Disk Utility at all).

The damaged hard drive bracket would not be the cause of the error above.

Try a non-AV drive (one designed for notebooks rather then surveillance/home theatre use) and see if that makes a difference.

4GB of RAM isn't much to be running all of those heavyweight apps at the same time. My guess would be that it's doing a lot of paging to disk. Check the size of the swap files on both machines.

1. Go to the Finder's "Go" menu and select "Go to Folder…".
2. Enter /private/var/vm/ into the box and press the "OK" button.
3. Add up the sizes of the swap files.

If it's more than 1GB I usually reboot. That will clear out these files. I've seen these files up to 4GB on a machine with 8GB of RAM.

Since running out of RAM can cause writes to disk, the difference in disk speed may be what's causing the delay.