I have a 2012 MacBook Pro with a 500GB Samsung SSD running Mojave. I replaced the optical drive with a hard drive and everything worked fine.
Recently, I replaced the old hard drive in the optical bay with a new HP 128GB SSD. With the HDD, my boot time was around 14 seconds. Now, with the SSD, it hangs for a second and then opens Disk Utility. I tried to click anything in Disk Utility and it continues to hang again.
I am about to pull it apart in frustration and format the darn thing with my clone cable. What could be causing the hanging and how should I format it if I am only storing code?