Hiya, just uprgaded OS drive to a lrager capacity SSD. Been some time since ive done that thanks to really stable system for a few years with Cubase Pro9.xx and Win 7 Pro.
Have you got drive indexing on or off and if so how did you do it?
I unchecked to drive indexing in the drive properties and after fetting hypnotied for what seem for ever watching a pop up box flying through all the files and rebooting, VST3 scanning wouldn’t work and everything went all awry so had to do another install.
Ive never used drive indexing for many years and it hasnt caused any problems though obviously the way i tried to do it this time didn’t work.
Any thoughts of best, safest and quickest way to do it? Theres quite a few ways on different forums but dont want to repeat the same mistake.
What I’m doing is leaving it on for my C: drive and off for any other drives. I’ve found that Windows will use that in a couple of areas such as start menu… something else… I’ve been set up this way for some time and happy with it.
Open explorer, right click your drive and uncheck/check right there. Yes it takes a while, make sure other programs closed during the process so there are no write-violations, but there shouldn’t be any errors with other programs as far as I’m aware.
Indexing / not-indexing doesn’t really make much difference on SSD. The problem is all about Windows search. It’s dreadful. File indexing is one of the worst aspects of Windows.
You’ll never touch Windows search again. It searches instantaneously - and in real time as you type. I have 10TB of data scattered across 5 drives, and I can find anything in milliseconds. Game changer. You can put the icon in your taskbar for easy access. Only downside - wish you could drag and drop from the app window into Cubase.
I have indexing turned off all drives too. No problems here.
Hmm, I’ll check that out, thanks, the problem with Windows indexing is that it’s constantly accessing and updating the drives in the background, not good an a DAW!
A lot of these background process / disk access concerns are hold overs from like 2005 when people had small 7200 rpm drives and small amounts of slow RAM. Indexing on an SSD is absolutely irrelevant to performance these days. Not sure why people still follow these archaic “make your computer optimized for audio!” when 99% of this poop is obsolete.
The reason I have mine shut off is because Windows OS level indexing is awful. Using ‘Everything’ will prove exactly how fast a drive can be indexed and searched when the feature is actually programmed well.
Thanks for all the help and clarification, about windows drive indexing…
I turned mine off for my C drive it’s a very fast Samsung NVME SSD of 2TB and this process is taking forever??? What a crappy windhoos!!! Is this normal?
By default Windows only indexes the content of User>AppData and Photos on C: drive, so this isn’t something you should worry about.
An SSD is already fast enough, and when a new file is added to one of these folders, it is added to the index file instantaneously.
This doesn’t affect performance for such small amount of data, except if you were indexing the whole content of a 8 TB HDD, but here again, once the files have been indexed, they won’t be indexed another time unless you modify them.
So the slowdown will kind of only happen when enabling or disabling indexing, because it has to read the whole drive.
To be more precise, indexing is a file property, so even when you disable it, it has to go through all the indexed files and change their property one by one, and this takes time, especially when there are a lot of small files, SSD or not SSD.
Thanks Louis,
I will let you know, if there is some significant improvement.
I am using my pc to create music, with a DAW, Cubase.
There are Cubase Users how benefit from disabling windows drive indexing, so it will give better audio performances, this is a very specific issue.
