How to Disable Contents Indexed Feature on a Drive

The Contents Indexed feature in Windows allows the operating system to index the files on your drive to speed up searches. However, this feature can slow down performance, particularly older machines or drives with limited resources. Disabling it can improve system performance or reduce unnecessary drive activity.

What does "Allow Files on This Drive to Have Contents Indexed" do?

When this option is enabled, Windows Search indexes not just file names but also the content inside documents, PDFs, emails, and other files. This can be helpful for searching text within files but may lead to:

• Increased disk usage

• Longer indexing times after large file changes

• Slower performance on older or HDD-based systems

Steps to disable Content Indexing on a drive

Follow these steps to turn off this feature for a specific drive:

Step 3. Open drive Properties

Right-click the drive, then click Properties.

Step 4. Uncheck the Indexing option

In the General tab, look for the checkbox for Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties and ensure to uncheck it.

Step 5. Apply the change

Click Apply, and then choose the second option when the Confirm Attribute Changes dialog box appears. You may also need administrator privileges to make this change.

Step 6. Wait for the process to complete

Windows will begin removing the indexing attributes from all files and folders. This may take a while depending on the size and number of files on your drive. Once the process finished, click on OK to exit.

Important notes

• Some system files or folders may not allow changes and will be skipped.

• Disabling indexing will make content-based searches slower, but filename searches will still work. Instead, you can use another alternative solution to search more quickly without affect the performance of the system.

Conclusion

Disabling the contents indexed feature on a drive can help optimize performance, especially for drives that do not benefit from search indexing. If you prioritize performance over fast file content search, turning off this feature is a simple and effective tweak.