Mayayana wrote:
"Terry Pinnell" wrote

| At various sites, e.g.
| https://www.maketecheasier.com/thing...-state-drives/
| I read that you should not use the index feature in Windows for SSDs. In
| my case I note that it's enabled.
|
| Q1: Should I disable it?
|
| Q2: What impact will that have (apart from the implied increased
| longevity of my SSD.)?
|

I always disable indexing. It seems very wasteful to
me. But I wonder if it might be more important for
disk drives than SSDs. An SSD has a limit, but it's
claimed to be so large that it's probably not relevant.
It's claimed they can take hundreds of TBs of writes.
My current SSD, in a box I built in 2015, has .84 TB
of writes on it, according to Samsung Magician. So
I worry more about useless seeks in the disk drive I
also have installed.

And as Paul said, it depends a lot on how you use
the computer. I'm very organized and rarely need to
do a search. I use Agent Ransack when I do. Other
people may search constantly, with no idea where
their files are. Those people might benefit from indexing.

| Q3: Given that I have the excellent Everything search program installed,
| I'm only now wondering if I need the built in Windows indexing at all,
| even on my other large HDs?

Isn't that indexing, anyway? I wouldn't even
allow that indexing and I don't see what's so
great about Everything. But that's just me and
my specific needs.

Everything.exe stores a list of filenames, dates, sizes.
It is not a content indexer. Reading the $MFT takes
two seconds, while doing a stat() on each item
to get dates and sizes is more expensive.

But comparing that to the preparation of an inverted
index filled with content and filenames, there's no
comparison on the computing (and I/O) effort. It can
take three hours to index content. And maybe 20 seconds
to build a half-ways decent filename-only list
for the competitor Everything.exe .

The Windows Search inverted index does minimal writes
per day, as a few files are added or removed from your
C: drive. In fact, indexing the content of Windows Updates
or Windows Defender files, could be more wasteful
than the user files you add yourself. That's where
using "exclusions" to not index the entire C:
comes in.

However, if you had a usage pattern where you
poured a million image files onto C: and then
deleted them at the end of the day. There will
be a lot of writes in that case. Of course
the file addition to C: would do 100 times
as much writing, as the writing of the index
in response. (For images, only the metadata
is captured, the pixmap is not stored in
the inverted index.)

It's important to keep these things in perspective.

You can probably construct some pathological situation
(such as when the Windows indexer gets into a loop).
In such a case, it would depend on how tight the
loop is, as to the total damage before the issue
is discovered. If a HDD was holding the
Windows.edb file in such a pathological case,
you wouldn't care. There have been cases
in the past, where I observed the file count
going up and down by 1, in a pattern, and
that's an indexing loop by Windows Search
indexer. The loop rate is about one per second
(not going to burn your SSD, but still annoying).

Paul