Mac OS X: disable spotlight on external USB drive

When a USB drive connects to the Mac, the spotlight will try to indexing the files on the drive. To check the activities of the spotlight, run

lsof | grep spotlight

. It might not be the behavior we want. To disable spotlight on the external drive, try the following: The mdutil command can be used to manage spotlight. Run the following command in Terminal:

sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/USBHD

will turn off spotlight indexing on external drive /Volumes/USBHD.

See also

• mdutil man page
• Disable spotlight for USB thumbdrives?
• Mac OS X: disable spotlight indexing for external usb drive