You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Can Spotlight search an NTFS drive?

I am running Mojave on an iMac. I have an 8TB NTFS for Mac drive. Version is 15.5.90 is the newest version available. Spotlight searching is not accurate. I am missing files in the search that I know are in there.

The mounting window has a check box that says "enable spotlight indexing," but when I check the box, it eventually unchecks it by itself. I have tried placing the drive in the spotlight "do not search" box, then removing it, but results are still inaccurate.

Any suggestions?

iMac Pro

Posted on Jan 22, 2022 2:34 PM

Top-ranking reply

BDAqua

Level 10

244,823 points

Posted on Jan 23, 2022 1:30 PM

Hi Richard,

Why can’t I search my external hard drive Mac?

The problem is that it’s an NTFS drive. Mac OS X doesn’t know how to write to NTFS drives, which prevents Spotlight from indexing them, and thus searching them.

Often asked: Can Spotlight Search External Drives? - AutoacService (stretchmaster.co.nz)

From that I'd assume that NTFS-3G would allow it...

NTFS-3G Safe Read/Write NTFS Driver download | SourceForge.net

Or Paragon NTFS for Mac...

Microsoft NTFS for Mac | Paragon Software (paragon-software.com)

View in context

Can Spotlight search an NTFS drive?

Similar questions