Mac Pro, Finder wont search the system drive.

[blackbird99]

Running Pro Tools 9 on a Mac Pro with OSX 10.6.8. We have 3 drives in the machine. After putting all 3 drives into the "Privacy" list for Spotlight Search as recommended by Avid, Finder will not search the system drive? When you type a file name or extension into the search window, it says its searching but returns nothing. Anyone have this problem?
Thanks

[sunburst79]

Originally Posted by blackbird99

Running Pro Tools 9 on a Mac Pro with OSX 10.6.8. We have 3 drives in the machine. After putting all 3 drives into the "Privacy" list for Spotlight Search as recommended by Avid, Finder will not search the system drive? When you type a file name or extension into the search window, it says its searching but returns nothing. Anyone have this problem?
Thanks

I believe that that is the normal behavior from drive exempted from Spotlite.

[25ghosts]

Originally Posted by blackbird99

Running Pro Tools 9 on a Mac Pro with OSX 10.6.8. We have 3 drives in the machine. After putting all 3 drives into the "Privacy" list for Spotlight Search as recommended by Avid, Finder will not search the system drive? When you type a file name or extension into the search window, it says its searching but returns nothing. Anyone have this problem?
Thanks

as sunburst says... drives in privacy are not searched by the os.

Although NOT recommended I have never had the need to disable spotlight on any drives to achieve performance.. Try NOT disabling spotlight and see if you run into problems. If you do, try exempting just the audio drive you record to... And not the system drive...

My guess is that you wont experience any problems

[Darryl Ramm]

I am not sure why you are surprised, you turned off indexing, so spotlight won't find things.

I think Avid has mostly been recommending just disabling indexing on the audio/session drive. However I have certainly seen problems caused by indexing running on the boot/system drive and I recommend to anybody experiencing problems to just disable spotlight on all drives. Wether you have problems will depend on your system, drive performance (a good SSD is much less likely affected than a HDD) and exactly what you are doing, e.g. CPU and IO load, wether VI samples are on the system drive etc. Apple also changed how aggressively the drives are indexed, in current OS X versions its more gentle and avoids hammering the drives as much as older versions, the downside is it can take much longer to index a drive (days....). I forget when exactly this was changed.

For finding stuff on the system you can avoid the need for spotlight at all by just being organized and using things like the UNIX find command to search for file names.

Darryl

[Kasper]

http://www.devontechnologies.com/products/freeware.html

EasyFind

Great little app. Free.


kasper

[YYR123]

Originally Posted by sunburst79

I believe that that is the normal behavior from drive exempted from Spotlight.

Yes and Just a note to the OP that I have it disabled only on my recording and sampling drives and I see no issues there works beautifully

SSD of course

[Darryl Ramm]

BTW I went back and checked on emails I had swapped with some Apple developers a while ago and from that all I can tell is that somewhere between OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.5 the spotlight indexing seemed to get significantly throttled. I'm curious if others have noticed this? I was actually grousing because it had got so slow (even on a fast SSD drive) even I did want to have it on a drive. So it may not mean much, but since the OP is on 10.6.8 he may have the older style more aggressive indexing (and therefore more prone to disrupting Pro Tools?). I don't know if they ever went back more aggressively in Mountain Lion.

Darryl

[Oliver M]

Originally Posted by Kasper

http://www.devontechnologies.com/products/freeware.html

EasyFind

Great little app. Free.


kasper

Excellent advise. I use this for years now, too.


Oliver

[YYR123]

Originally Posted by oliver m

excellent advise. I use this for years now, too.


Oliver

advice !!!!!!!

[blackbird99]

Thanks for replies. Im new to Mac and of course you can turn off indexing in Windows and it will still search.

Thanks for recommending that app, I'll try it. Finder appears in many posts on Mac forums as a problem and cause of crashes anyway.

Thanks
Mike