Turn off Spotlight

Spotlight searches drives attached to Macs (OS 10.4 and above), indexing all the content it can find. This can be a nuisance for drives you attach temporarily to your computer, when you don't want the system to write to the drive. Here's how to stop Spotlight, at least in OS 10.6, disabling indexing until you enable it with the second command:

sudo mdutil -a -i off

sudo mdutil -a -i on