Jan 24 2008
Preventing Mac OS from eating flash-based drives…
As described in some detail at Ars Technica, Mac OS 10.5 will log all filesystem activity on a volume to a .fseventsd directory in the root of the volume. For removable media this is at best not helpful, and at worst actively damaging.
Luckily, as described also in the above article, this ‘feature’ can be disabled by creating a file named “no_log” in the “.fseventsd” directory.
The next thing to check is whether telling Spotlight to exclude “/Volumes” from its search paths will prevent removable drives being indexed whilst still maintaining indexing on the system drive…
27th July 2009 @ 12:34 pm
Further to this last point, rather than adding individual drives to the Privacy view of the Spotlight Control Panel applet, the better solution is to create an empty file named “.metadata_never_index” in the root directory of the drive.