Tweaking spotlight

Spotlight generally causes disks to slow down and uses a lot of CPU cycles. The command-line utilities find, grep and locate are more efficient and run on-demand rather than randomly starting up and making your disk busy. If you find you can't eject a disk, it's generally because spotlight is using it.

To permanently turn spotlight off for every disk:

launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

Warning: if you do that, you won't be able to search using the magnifying glass tool in the menubar.

To turn off spotlight for any attached (USB) disk:

sudo defaults write /.Spotlight-V100/VolumeConfiguration Exclusions -array "/Volumes"

To turn off spotlight for any specific disk:

sudo mdutil -a -i off /Volume

 

rm /.metadata_never_index 

 

mdutil -i on /



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