Spotlight disabled - but mds still appearing
I've finally narrowed down my exceptionally poor battery life on my brand new Macbook Pro to spotlight. The MDS process goes into total overdrive using up 103% CPU, fans roaring and battery of less than 30mins on a full charge. I think I'm exacerbating the situation as my daily workflow as a photographer involves transferring files from 10 or 20 different SD cards to various different external hard drives which then get sent out to clients - so I'm rarely using the same hard drive each time
Blocking an SD card from working appears to put a file on the card that then stops the camera from reading it, so I can't use the privacy settings in spotlight for that.
I've used the commands
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
and
sudo mdutil -a -i off
and
mdutil -as | open -ef (which pops up a text file saying spotlight server is disabled)
I thought this meant spotlight was well and truly dead and for an hour or so it seemed to be working, battery life indicated it would last over 10 hours - perfect! I then switched SD cards out and lo and behold fans go wild again, spotlight is listed as an app using significant battery and mds is back at the top of the process list.
I can work around not having spotlight, but I can't work around the terrible performance with it on - is there any way at all to kill it permanently or a command that I can plug in that will stop it ever touching any external drive?
