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Disabling Spotlight Indexing on Optical Drives (and Externals)

What I want to do is disable the Spotlight indexing of my optical drives; I want Spotlight to ignore my optical drives completely, forever, regardless what disc media I put in them.


Before you flame, yes, I searched all over the Apple Support Community for an answer to this. Any help I could find points one of the popular suggestions below (none of which solve my problem). I'll list those unhelpful suggestions here so you aren't inclined to repeat them, and hopefully that will save both of us some time :-)


Solutions that don't work for telling Spotlight to ignore ANY possible volume mounted via optical drives:

  1. Adding a file ".metadata_never_index" to each volume I want Spotlight to ignore (not a good solution for optical media, since some optical media is already burned, and also because I want to set it and forget it, not fix it over and over)
  2. Writing a script and/or using launchd to disable indexing on external drives when they are mounted (I do want to index SOME external drives, and the ones I don't, I can add to the Privacy tab of Spotlight preferences manually - I want to ignore all optical media and/or my optical drives)
  3. A 3rd party app called Spotless (which isn't being developed anymore, doesn't support Mountain Lion, and doesn't have an option to NOT index all optical and/or external drives anyway)
  4. Adding /Volumes to Spotlight's Privacy/ignore tab in Spotlight preferences. This doesn't do anything useful, since drives are only mounted there and adding the /Volumes location to the Privacy tab (at least in Mountain Lion) will actually produce the unintended result of Spotlight indexing ALL your drives/volumes, instead of ignoring them.
  5. Turning off Spotlight completely. I need it.


Why I want to DISABLE Spotlight indexing of all optical drives (i.e. "the problem"):

I have two internal Superdrives and one external Blu-Ray drive on my Mac Pro. I use Spotlight all day to launch apps, files, etc., but I am working with optical media all day as well, which is either in the process of being created (i.e. "burned") or read by an application. Every time I do a Spotlight search, my optical drives (that are already in use by other applications), start making awful noises because Spotlight is apparently trying to access them, and since other applications are also accessing them, the drive read heads are apparently trying to read two different places on the optical media, resulting in this awful sound and subsequently causing any apps reading data from those drives to slow down and/or freeze.


Whether the optical drives were already indexed or not isn't really important to me, or relevant (at least I don't think so) to this topic. I just need to know how to make Spotlight IGNORE my optical drives completely.


I know that I can selective add any CD/DVD mounted volume to the Privacy tab in Spotlight preferences. This does not solve my problem, because all day I am creating new volumes in those optical drives, and I would have to repeat that step for each new volume I make (a process that would drive any sane person crazy).


I do have 1 external FW800 hard drive array (not optical) that I would like to keep indexing. So I don't want to ignore all external drives, just optical ones.


Any help would be so appreciated... but I am afraid there isn't a solution for my particular problem. I can't believe I didn't find anyone else complaining about this in the forums.

Posted on Dec 27, 2012 7:15 PM

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Disabling Spotlight Indexing on Optical Drives (and Externals)

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