Spotlight index

If i connect my external hard drive. will the spotlight index be stored on the boot volume or the external hard drive?

 

no one knows? by boot volume i meant the internal harddrive that OS X is installed. by external harddrive i meant individual drive itself.

 

My best guess is that Spotlight index files for the external drive would be stored on the external drive. That was the case with Tiger, right?

Why does this concern you? I don't intend to be rude here, I'm genuinely curious. And now a quote from Ars Technica by John Siracusa regarding Spotlight in Tiger,

Source: Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger - Spotlight

There wasn't much information on indexing in Ars Technica's Leopard Review. I suppose if you were dedicated to finding a definitive answer to this question you could easily check your external hard drive for a hidden spotlight directory.

EDIT: OK I stopped being lazy and checked my external drive and sure enough there was a .Spotlight-V100 directory. Of course there is another Spotlight directory on my internal hard drive too. Does anyone else see a Spotlight directory on their external drive? You will need to show Hidden Files in OS X to see the directory. Use Terminal.app (Application > Utilities) and enter the following code:

To Show Hidden Files

Code:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder

To Hide Hidden Files

Code:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
killall Finder

 

thanks Xander, that answers my question.

yes this is for tiger. i've switched back

the reason i ask is because i've got 2 huge external drive that i will connect my puny internal notebook harddrive to, and i don't want it to waste space inside my internal drive, if the spotlight index is stored there.

again, thanks for doing a hell of an effort

edit: hey i just noticed that this looks like apple close, minimized, zoom buttom.

 

You're welcome! That's Good news for you then. The Spotlight index files are stored on the volume they index for both Tiger and Leopard.

The size of the index files are relatively small though. For example, on my 250GB drive with 150GB of data, the Spotlight index files are only about 52MB. But every byte counts.