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What do these redundant indexing options even do?

Anonymous
2023-01-17T12:00:20+00:00

I had huge problem with several external HDDs and even SSDs due to indexing. My system slowed down and mouse cursor was replaced with progress wheel several times a second. I couldn't safely remove the drive because indexing prevented this.

It turns out, I had to disable indexing service.

Now I have question on what those indexing properties do.

  1. There are "Indexing Options" in control panel, they never included external HDDs, yet indexing somehow slowed down HDDs, why?
  2. Even with "Indexing Options" not containing any folder or drive and indexing service disabled, a freshly formatted HDD/SSD "Properties" tab has "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed.." checked, why?
  3. When I uncheck "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed.." there is a window "You have chosen to make the following attribute changes disable indexing " with choise "Apply changes to drive X only" or "Apply changes to drive X, subfolders and files".

Choosing the 2nd takes huge ammount of time on full HDD(despite search indexing being already disabled) progress bar appears and goes through every file there. First option works much quicker. Will first option prevent indexing fro new files and folders? Do I even need to uncheck "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed.." if I have indexing service disabled?

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Cortana and search

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  1. Anonymous
    2023-01-19T07:43:40+00:00

    I tried to research it, but there really is no info online. You yourself aren't sure if disabling indexing in drive properties helps when indexing service is already disabled.

    Can't go wrong with disabling everything, but I'd prefer to know if I can save time by not changing indexing property of every single file on the drive.

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-01-18T00:03:00+00:00

    For 2, its just default setting. Something has to be in programming. This is the default way so its default. Don't over complicate it :)

    For 3, I've always chosen the slow road there. That's just how I've always done it. Should I wish to do more then I then also disable Indexing service and/or also go into Indexing Options and remove all folders possible. That is just how I do it. I don't question what doesn't cause me problems.

    For 1, last but not least, I don't remember the specifics. You should be able to research them. But specifically the drive properties it actually says, "to have contents indexed in addition to file properties" and its for the entire drive with no exceptions if you go with the full thing. I've always done it for performance tweaking just because I never use Indexing. The tweak has been around for a long time. Do you need to do all 3? Probably not. But, it gets it out of the picture of possibility to a greater extent.

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