SSD: Allow files to be indexed?

provoko

Gawd
Joined
Aug 6, 2004
Messages
656
Hey [H]ardPeeps,

I just got a new SSD, and I forget, should I be unchecking the option in Windows 7 C drive:
"Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties"?

As I remember, Indexing options is great, but not content indexed on the drive.

Thanks
 
Generally, win7 can be left alone to do the right thing. Indexing is mostly reads and doesn't add up to much wear on the drive. I'm not at my Intel SSD-equipped PC, but the later Intel SSD Toolbox may have suggested turning it off. I just did a quick scan of the docs for it and I don't see it mentioned.

At any rate, there isn't a "wear and tear" reason to disable it and even with the high speed of SSDs a prebuilt search index will still be faster.
 
I actually turn off indexing on all drives. Even hard drives. Since I have a > 1 million files on my hard drive and turning this darn feature on will prevent me from using my work machine for days and provide me very little benefit. When I need to search file contents I do that in notepad++.
 
A lot of people say to turn it off, but I've never heard a good reason for why you would want to. It doesn't do a lot of writes to the drive, and an index is still faster than a search on the drive even on an SSD. I think the argument is that the SSD can be searched really quickly so there isn't much point to indexing, but since Win 7 isn't as aggressive with the indexing as Vista was, I don't see a problem having it enabled.
 
I actually turn off indexing on all drives. Even hard drives. Since I have a > 1 million files on my hard drive and turning this darn feature on will prevent me from using my work machine for days and provide me very little benefit. When I need to search file contents I do that in notepad++.

I've never had a problem with file indexing on mechanical drives. Sure if you turn it off after the OS is installed and then try to turn it on later it will be a pain in the ass, but I've never noticed it on a fresh install with existing data volumes in place.
 
My basic problem is I have over 1TB of data (source code / builds, medical images, ...) that contains > 1 million files that has been migrated from windows 95 to nt4 to win2000 to XP to XP64 and now to Win7 x64 over the last 15 years. None of that was ever indexed. When I first started win7 it thrashed continuously for the first day. I had to kill the thrashing so I disabled this feature. The search does not seem to work well in any case for me so I use other tools and disable the indexing.
 
My basic problem is I have over 1TB of data (source code / builds, medical images, ...) that contains > 1 million files that has been migrated from windows 95 to nt4 to win2000 to XP to XP64 and now to Win7 x64 over the last 15 years. None of that was ever indexed. When I first started win7 it thrashed continuously for the first day. I had to kill the thrashing so I disabled this feature. The search does not seem to work well in any case for me so I use other tools and disable the indexing.

You should be able to tune the indexer to exclude your "source code" directories if you wish, and still get the benefit of indexing for other purposes. Starting with Vista one of my most-used features was the search dialog in the start menu. WIN + "cmd" - command prompt. WIN + "excel" - there's excel. WIN + "add or" and there's the program uninstaller. WIN+"steam" - there's steam. Ditto for any game, executable, or frequently used document. AFAIK it learns from use too so if it offers multiple hits and you usually pick a particular one it will make it your default. When you have lots of stuff installed it really streamlines things and is faster than shortcuts, desktop links, toolbars etc... (at least for me).

Now, I don't think that indexing MUST be on to use that feature but it would be far faster and have more useful results. If indexing is off, I'm not sure what order/algorithm that OS functionality uses to open files or launch programs.

All that being said, even if you didn't exclude your "source code" area, it would only index it once presuming that the content doesn't change often. If it is truly useless to index you can exclude it instead of disabling the feature entirely, if you wish. Although I haven't done it under 7 I have done it in Windows Search 4.0 for XP, and that is supposed to be based on the Vista/7 functionality.
 
You can tell the indexer not to index file contents, just locations. But yes, leave it alone on an SSD.
 
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