How do I disable Spotlight on a SL partition?

MikeHunt79 · 23 Sep 2009 at 16:24

Is there a was of disabling Spotlight on a SL partition, by editing .plist files?

My system is running an SSD to I want to be able to disable spotlight before I even boot the machine up.

Feek · 23 Sep 2009 at 16:32

Just exclude the drive from Spotlight?

Spotlight preferences, Privacy and add the drive in there.

OllyM · 23 Sep 2009 at 16:58

Why is it so important to disable Spotlight if you have an SSD?

Feek · 23 Sep 2009 at 17:12

I have no idea, unless it's to do with extending the life, but last year Intel claimed their SSDs would last for 'at least' five years, assuming 100Gb written per day! Now I'm sure I don't write anywhere near that on a daily basis and I doubt I'd keep a single drive for five years anyway.

Mike - I'm intrigued, why do you want to do this?

OllyM · 23 Sep 2009 at 17:21

But Spotlight indexing just reads data, and writes to a database I guess :confused:

Feek · 23 Sep 2009 at 17:23

Exactly, that's why I don't know why some people are suggesting to disable it on SSDs.

MikeHunt79 · 23 Sep 2009 at 18:06

Well, I have my reasons, I'm trying to use Logic to stream lots of sound files at once so I'm trying disable all things running in the background as my system is struggling when I use lots of tracks at once.

Also, spotlight is pretty useless on SSD, as the access time is virtually nothing so even if you search for a file when spotlight is disabled it will find it very quickly.

With 10.5 you can edit the /Volumes/snow/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
file, which will disable the spotlight service, I'm guessing this can be done in 10.6 also?

OllyM · 23 Sep 2009 at 18:42

Spotlight is hardly an intensive background process, I bet it makes no difference.

MikeHunt79 · 23 Sep 2009 at 19:49

OllyM said:
Spotlight is hardly an intensive background process, I bet it makes no difference.

Well, even if it makes very little difference, I'd still prefer it if it was disabled...

I think I've found out how to do it now, /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/Metadata.framework/Versions/A/Resources/com.apple.SpotlightServer.plist
appears to be the key file.

Feek · 23 Sep 2009 at 19:50

Does just adding it to the privacy thing not do the job rather than tweaking files?

MikeHunt79 · 23 Sep 2009 at 21:02

Feek said:
Does just adding it to the privacy thing not do the job rather than tweaking files?

Almost, I can stop it scanning existing drives but as soon as I plug in an external HD or USB stick, I have to disable spotlight on each and every drive.

I've done it now, a really easy way is to just enter "sudo mdutil -a -i off" in terminal, much easier than fiddling around plist files which didn't work properly anyway.

Feek · 23 Sep 2009 at 22:31

Just another thought, it doesn't really matter now as you've done it but what about unticking all the options in Search Results, would that do it?

MikeHunt79 · 23 Sep 2009 at 23:18

I found that the mdutil command I used only stopped the indexing, the icon was still up on the menubar... I'll try unticking all the boxes, it's worth a go.