Instant search solution for an external hard drive?

August 16, 2008 8:54 AM

Is there a desktop search solution that will index my external hard drives? So far I have had no luck with Google Desktop search.
posted by greenknightwatch to computers & internet (9 answers total)

Try windows search yet?
posted by damn dirty ape at 9:00 AM on August 16, 2008

Lifehacker has a couple of posts related to desktop search that might be helpful.
posted by puritycontrol at 9:05 AM on August 16, 2008

Yeah, actually, it's hard to prevent Windows Search from indexing external drives. (By the way, what OS are you running?)
posted by Class Goat at 10:35 AM on August 16, 2008

copernic desktop search does a good job for me.
I like it because it can index folders on non-mapped network drives too.
posted by Iax at 11:06 AM on August 16, 2008

Google will tell you how to have GDS index external drives.
posted by Tomorrowful at 11:20 AM on August 16, 2008

The main thing to remember with google desktop is that if you do MAJOR moves and changes with files and folders you will need to re-index which means uninstalling and reinstalling to force a new re-indexing as opposed to tracking new files.
posted by jadepearl at 1:27 PM on August 16, 2008 [1 favorite]

If you don't need to search within documents (just filenames), I suggest Advanced File Organizer. I've been using it for a few years and it never fails to be fast and easy to use.

According to the website:

Advanced File Organizer is a cataloger for all disks, which are recognized by your Windows system. This includes diskettes, hard disks, CDs, DVDs, Memory Stick card and any other storage devices. Advanced File Organizer can be your DVD organizer or CD organizer, if you want. It helps to create a catalog of your disk collection. Using such catalog, you can easily find all necessary files and folders without the need to insert disks into the drive.

It allows you to update individual drives/discs and doesn't need to run in the background. The version I have will recognize ID3 tags for mp3's, too.

I have no suggestions if you need to search within files, but I'll be watching this topic because I'm interested in this, as well.
posted by bugsoup at 5:16 PM on August 16, 2008

If you still have Google Desktop installed, have you tried indexing folders on the drive, rather than the drive itself?

I had problems like that before (on Ubuntu, YMMV) where if I added an external drive x: say, it ignored me, but if i indexed x:/photos, it worked fine.
posted by latentflip at 5:35 PM on August 16, 2008

If you're on a Mac (your post doesn't indicate) then spotlight does this.
posted by Brian Puccio at 1:35 PM on August 17, 2008