Indexing Question

Hey guys.

I love how spotlight works in OSX and am looking to get similar extremely fast search results from 7. I want to change the indexing options to include my entire C and E Drives. However that will be an entire 750 GB hard disk. I'm concerned that this will considerably decrease the speed of my computer.

I understand in the short term there will be considerable hard drive thrashing while it indexes all the data, but after this is done will I still experience slow downs and such (when installing programs or transferring a large amount of files for example)? Can I safely have all my partitions indexed and not fear a general downturn in performance?

Thanks in advance.

I dont think so, indexing always slows down the computer, forever.

Thats not an entirely true statement Uber.

You can move indexing off the main OS drive onto another drive thereby releasing the OS to do its thing without having to fight the indexing service.

1. run control panel and in the search box type "indexing"
2. click on the green link and the indexing options will appear
3. click on the adanced button
4. In the index location box click on select new button to relocate the database.

This procedure will relocate the indexing database to a new folder of your choosing. After that you could safely select an entire drive to index if you wish (except C: since that will negate the purpose of moving the database in the first place).

You may notice Windows to be slightly more responsive after relocating it.

I stand corrected. i don't like putting myself in positions where im probably wrong, but I'm still learning, so thanks for the explanation Swarfega.

swarfega said:

Thats not an entirely true statement Uber.

You can move indexing off the main OS drive onto another drive thereby releasing the OS to do its thing without having to fight the indexing service.

1. run control panel and in the search box type "indexing"
2. click on the green link and the indexing options will appear
3. click on the adanced button
4. In the index location box click on select new button to relocate the database.

This procedure will relocate the indexing database to a new folder of your choosing. After that you could safely select an entire drive to index if you wish (except C: since that will negate the purpose of moving the database in the first place).

You may notice Windows to be slightly more responsive after relocating it.

Click to expand...

Interesting. I will give this a shot.

swarfega said:

You may notice Windows to be slightly more responsive after relocating it.

Click to expand...

I have to agree here, my desktop has a total of 4 hard drives (so about 3.8 Terabytes of data) and although I don't have numbers on this. From personal experience I found my computer to be much faster after indexing my files. The long waiting time for search results everytime I needed to find something on my computer we're extremely annoying. I honestly don't see why you wouldnt index your files. Even IF it slowed down your computer, it just makes for a better user-friendly experience to find things faster on your hard drives

Indexing isn't a processor hungry process, it's an I/O hungry process.The reason why indexing slows down the computer is because it has to read the files ( or specifically the files attributes) to index them. File access doesn't get faster with indexing, so the computer feeling faster is probably a placebo effect or simply because the indexing doesn't need to constantly read files from your HDD anymore once it finnished index everything. It just has to index the new files. Also if you set indexing not to index your OS drive, then you lose the the fast search for any files on your OS drive, even on different partitions. You won't feel a slowdown then transferring files because Windows will stop indexing then. However the slowness come when you want to launch programs and access small files. It takes cause windows is still indexing and it can't anticipate exactly when you're gonna access those files. So when the indexing process and the other program send read request to the disk at the same time and the data's all over the place, there will be a performance hit.