ToTo Man
the band not the dog
This is the first time I've encountered this issue in my almost two decades of using Mac OSX and I don't know what to do...
Every time I boot up one of my recently acquired 2012 Mac Minis, onto which I did a clean install of El Capitan, Spotlight spends the first half hour or so re-indexing my external HDD. I thought nothing of it for the first few days, I even left the machine idle for a whole day so that Spotlight could do its thing, so it's not as if I haven't given it chance to index the drive. But I'm a month in now and it still does it on every startup, even if I haven't added or edited files on the drive.
I read a suggestion to add the affected drive to the privacy tab in Spotlight preferences and then remove it to force a re-index. I tried this but it doesn't seem to have helped. I read on another Apple discussion that replacing the Logic board fixed a similar problem on a MacBook Pro, which seems a drastic course of action!
Is there anything else I can try that's less invasive? I could resort to putting the drive permanently onto Spotlight's privacy list, but then I would presumably be unable to search for files, which would be somewhat inconvenient! I also worry that, if Spotlight is constantly re-indexing my external HDD on every boot, is it doing the same with the internal SSD, and therefore causing unnecessary wear and tear?
Every time I boot up one of my recently acquired 2012 Mac Minis, onto which I did a clean install of El Capitan, Spotlight spends the first half hour or so re-indexing my external HDD. I thought nothing of it for the first few days, I even left the machine idle for a whole day so that Spotlight could do its thing, so it's not as if I haven't given it chance to index the drive. But I'm a month in now and it still does it on every startup, even if I haven't added or edited files on the drive.
I read a suggestion to add the affected drive to the privacy tab in Spotlight preferences and then remove it to force a re-index. I tried this but it doesn't seem to have helped. I read on another Apple discussion that replacing the Logic board fixed a similar problem on a MacBook Pro, which seems a drastic course of action!
Is there anything else I can try that's less invasive? I could resort to putting the drive permanently onto Spotlight's privacy list, but then I would presumably be unable to search for files, which would be somewhat inconvenient! I also worry that, if Spotlight is constantly re-indexing my external HDD on every boot, is it doing the same with the internal SSD, and therefore causing unnecessary wear and tear?