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Can Spotlight search an NTFS drive?

I am running Mojave on an iMac. I have an 8TB NTFS for Mac drive. Version is 15.5.90 is the newest version available. Spotlight searching is not accurate. I am missing files in the search that I know are in there.

The mounting window has a check box that says "enable spotlight indexing," but when I check the box, it eventually unchecks it by itself. I have tried placing the drive in the spotlight "do not search" box, then removing it, but results are still inaccurate.

Any suggestions?

iMac Pro

Posted on Jan 22, 2022 2:34 PM

Top-ranking reply

BDAqua

Level 10

245,177 points

Posted on Jan 23, 2022 1:30 PM

Hi Richard,

Why can’t I search my external hard drive Mac?

The problem is that it’s an NTFS drive. Mac OS X doesn’t know how to write to NTFS drives, which prevents Spotlight from indexing them, and thus searching them.

Often asked: Can Spotlight Search External Drives? - AutoacService (stretchmaster.co.nz)

From that I'd assume that NTFS-3G would allow it...

NTFS-3G Safe Read/Write NTFS Driver download | SourceForge.net

Or Paragon NTFS for Mac...

Microsoft NTFS for Mac | Paragon Software (paragon-software.com)

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Can Spotlight search an NTFS drive?

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