Spotlight writing to external Bluray burner

[ElectricPotato]

I plugged a Bluray burner drive into my MBP 2018 with Mojave 10.14.6. There was a partially full burnable disc in the drive I was trying to copy. Reading data from the drive was horribly slow and I could not eject the drive as it was running continuously even after the copy was aborted. I shutdown the Mac and plugged the drive into a Windows machine and saw Spotlight had started burning indexing files onto the burnable Bluray disc in the drive. That's what was making it so slow.

I tried adding the external drive to the Privacy list in Spotlight system preferences but got an error and the drive was not added. Obviously, burning spotlight indexing files to any burnable disc in the drive is not what any sane person wants. I did not find anything useful on Google.

Has anyone else encountered this and found a work around? For now I can copy files from discs onto Windows then copy them to the Mac but it boggles the mind that this "feature" prevents me from using the drive on macOS.

 

[Fishrrman]

My solution to spotlight is to TURN IT OFF and leave it turned off.
For reasons just like the one you described above.

 

[ElectricPotato]

My solution to spotlight is to TURN IT OFF and leave it turned off.

That is a reasonable suggestion, though I find it useful now and then. I noticed Windows also wrote hidden files to the disc, though it did not index it. The formatting of this re-writable disc must make it look like enough of a regular drive that it is treated as such.

I use the external Bluray drive seldom enough I may not worry about it and avoid loading rewritable discs formatted that way on the Mac.