Indexing External Drive Issues

[glenerrolrd]

Whenever I add a new external drive (be it for regular use or just backup) the OS will read the entire drive to create an index. With smaller drives this was just an irritation of 20-30minutes ..but now I have a RAID5 with 4 2TB drives. This will be 4-5hours of non stop noise ?

Is there a better way to do this on a schedule ..say use the drive now and then set it for indexing over night ?

 

[wilsonlaidlaw]

Whenever I add a new external drive (be it for regular use or just backup) the OS will read the entire drive to create an index. With smaller drives this was just an irritation of 20-30minutes ..but now I have a RAID5 with 4 2TB drives. This will be 4-5hours of non stop noise ?

Is there a better way to do this on a schedule ..say use the drive now and then set it for indexing over night ?

I presume you are talking about Spotlight indexing. Two points 1) do you really need a Spotlight index of your external drive. You can disable it by going to the privacy settings in system preferences; 2) If you are using Snow Leopard, it may be wise to do this anyway, as it reduces the incidence of the 10810 Finder error crash. Many SL users are having to disable Spotlight indexing on their internal hard drives as well, to avoid this issue or even disable Spotlight all together in Terminal. As far as I know there is no easy way to schedule indexing. You could disable indexing in Automator and the re-enable it at a scheduled time, disabling it again at say 7 AM.

Wilson