How To Stop Your Hard Disks Grinding Away

Problem

You have used Apple Remote Desktop and youre Macs are heavily using their harddisk(s), while you're not doing anything with it that justifies such heavy hard disk use. Chances are, this is a system background process called 'build_hd_index'. On Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) this seems to happen every night at midnight, on Mac OS X 10.5 (Tiger) this can happen after every Time Machine backup - depending on your preferences, this can be every hour. Fortunately, this is not very hard to fix yourself.

Solution: shut build_hd_index down

  1. In the Finder, go to the Utilities folder (keyboard shortcut: COMMAND-SHIFT-U) and open Terminal (shortcuts: press T to select the Terminal, then press COMMAND-arrow down to open it).
  2. Type (or better: copy / paste:)

    sudo chmod a-x /System/Library/\
    CoreServices/RemoteManagement/\
    ARDAgent.app/Contents/Support/build_hd_index
  3. Quit Terminal
  4. If build_hd_index is still going since it started it current session before your Terminal actions, you can open Activities (it's in the Utilities folder as well) and kill it by selecting it and pressing the stop process button.

Remarks

Spotlight has it's own index, so this won't affect it.

If you have any additions or comments, don't hesitate to drop me a line at solutions@beeldbuijs.nl

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