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Spotlight never seems to stop indexing

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Nov 4, 2011
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Motherboard
ASUS P8H61-M LE/CSM
CPU
i2500K
Graphics
Intel HD Graphics 3000
Mac
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Classic Mac
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So, I did a lot of homework on this yesterday but unfortunately never came across a concrete solution. So I thought I'd bring it up in this community to see if it may even be hackintosh related. When I say constant indexing, I don't necessarily mean the HD is constantly going crazy and that spotlight shows a progress bar that it's indexing. It's just that the hard drive light flickers every 1-2 seconds and it never stops- even if all programs are closed. When I run the command

sudo fs_usage -f filesys mds mdworker mdimport

mds and mdworker are almost constantly at work and from what I've read these are process related directly to spotlight.

Possible solutions I've read about are temporarily putting the OS drive in the "privacy" settings for spotlight, then removing it so that spotlight is forced to re-index the drive. Also, to make sure to delete and redo your time machine backup. I've done both and the hd activity continues. Interestingly enough, if I reboot it goes away until I've put the mac to sleep- once it's back from sleep that's when the mds and mdworker process go to town again.

The most annoying side effect of this is it actually seems to be waking up the machine from sleep. Other than that- it doesn't really seem to have any effect as far as slowness or cpu usage. I just don't really like the thought of my HD never getting a rest- ever. Many thanks to anyone who's run into this and has a fix, or others who may just have suggestions to continue troubleshooting.
 
Even more research would indicate that it could have something to do with my dvd burner since I've pretty much tried every possible known spotlight fix. That sometimes a dvd/cd drive will cause a hd to flicker every second like mine.. This case is in a real PITA spot to get out and put back in to take apart, so I"m wondering if anyone knows a simple way I could temporarily disable the optical drive from the os?

Update.. Just for the heck of it I decided to just go ahead and pop a dvd in the drive.. The hard drive flicker has stopped! So bizarre- but if all it takes is leaving a dvd in the drive- so be it..
 
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