Beyond Development

First get a list of the drives you want to stop or prevent Spotlight from indexing. So go to Terminal. (Your Applications, Utilities folder)

Type:

• Become root, type: sudo
• Your hard drives will normally be listed under /Volumes; type:
  
  • ls -la /Volumes
  • If you don’t see the one you want to not index use the command below.
    • diskutil list 
      • It will get you a list of all the volumes available
    • And read the full article here.
• OK, once you know which volume to isolate type:
  • mdutil -i off /Volumes/DRIVE-NAME/
    • You might have to give your password, after a few seconds indexing of that volume will be terminated.
• Just in case go and delete any indexes Spotlight did. Type:
  • mdutil -E /Volumes/DRIVE-NAME/
• Done!

PS. If you’d like to mount Windows network drives read this. This tip was inspired by this great post.