I have Mac Mini with an external hard drive. The external drive is indexed with Spotlight. Whenever I use Spotlight to start an app on the local machine, the external drive spins up, because obviously Spotlight wants to check the spotlight files on the external drive for search hits. The drive makes an audible noise, and stays running for some five minutes until it idles to a stop.

Is there any way around this, apart from disabling Spotlight or disconnecting the drive? Obviously, I understand that Spotlight must access the spotlight files to check for search hits, and can't tell the difference if I want to launch an app or find a file, when I just type "Sa" for Safari.

The only cure I could think of was if the entire spotlight database was cached in memory, or was placed on the local hard drive, or if I used a different hotkey for finding files and launching apps.