Spotlight and External Hard Drive

[midgetski]

Hi,

I recently got a macbook and I have attached my external hard drive which was previously used as a backup for my PC and has about 100 GB on it. When connected it seems to slow down the machine considerably which I presume is happening because spotlight is indexing the files. The option to ignore the external hard drive in the system preferences does not seem to work. Are there any solutions?

Also should I format the external hard drive using Apple Disk? Would I see better performance? If it were formatted would it still be compatible with my PC?

Thanks

 

[Nightkrawler]

I have the same problem with my external NTFS HDD, my FAT32 one doesn't do this. I think the problem is that os-x cant write the spotlight settings on the ntfs drive and has to rescan it every time. (Did anyone try the new macfuse ntfs driver and still have this problem)

You could format it under HFS (or HFS+) but Windows cant read/write on it without tools.

 

[Nightkrawler]

YES!
Found a way to disable spotlight on any drive you want (FAT32 or NTFS, both are working)
just create an empty file called ".metadata_never_index" in the root of the "spotlight problematic" HDD (you can use terminal to create them with "touch .metadata_never_index"; i used windows to create one on my ntfs partition)
after a reboot spotlight wont index them anymore.
Finally no more slowdowns, spotlight is way faster now!

need more help?