Spotlight and external hard drive

[midgetski]

Hi,

I recently got a macbook and I have attached my external hard drive which was previously used as a backup for my PC and has about 100 GB on it. When connected it seems to slow down the machine considerably which I presume is happening because spotlight is indexing the files. The option to ignore the external hard drive in the system preferences does not seem to work. Are there any solutions?

Also should I format the external hard drive using Apple Disk? Would I see better performance? If it were formatted would it still be compatible with my PC?



Thanks

 

[Will_3rd]

I recently got a macbook and I have attached my external hard drive which was previously used as a backup for my PC and has about 100 GB on it. When connected it seems to slow down the machine considerably which I presume is happening because spotlight is indexing the files. The option to ignore the external hard drive in the system preferences does not seem to work. Are there any solutions?

Not sure try formatting it again, what file system is it using?

Also should I format the external hard drive using Apple Disk? Would I see better performance? If it were formatted would it still be compatible with my PC?

Disk Utility should be able to format it for you, HFS+ (Journaled) would be best if your using it with your Macbook. FAT32 if you want to use it with both Windows/OSX.