Windows Search's default indexing mode could be writing gigabytes to your SSD every day for a feature almost nobody uses

Published Sep 17, 2026, 1:30 PM EDT Abhinav pivoted from a career in banking to pursue his first love in writing. Even while working full-time, he continued contributing as an editor-at-large, a role he has held for more than 7 years. A lifelong tech enthusiast who has built three gaming and productivity powerhouse PCs since 2018, his passion for technology keeps him closely following the semiconductor industry, from NVIDIA and AMD to ARM. His MSc dissertation explored how artificial intelligence will reshape the future of work, reflecting his curiosity about the wider social impact of emerging technologies. I spend an absurd amount of time auditing Windows 11 and the impact of its processes on various aspects of the PC. Recently, I was looking into what Windows quietly keeps adding to my C: drive, and the search index was the component I expected to find bloated. After all, a lot of guides on the subject warn that this database can grow into hundreds of gigabytes. However, I was surprised to find mine measured only 502MB across nearly 100,000 indexed items. Yet, reading through various forum posts and Windows subreddits where users reported the file ballooning past the 100GB mark on the same Windows 11 build that I am using had me rethinking. I've since come to realize that Windows Search stores what is inside your files, not just their names, and it continues to re-index them every time they change. On some systems, the impact can be negligible, but clearly, on others, it can reach up to 200GB. Windows Indexing could be costing you more storage than you think It takes one PowerShell script to find out The file that you're looking for is named Windows.db, which is the search index itself. It's the database Windows Search compiles so that when you start typing into the Start menu, results return immediately instead of indexing your drive afresh every time you input a query. It holds an entry for every indexed file. Although Windows gives you no straightforward way to see how much Windows Indexing is taking up, there's a fairly simple way to check on your device, and that involves a single PowerShell script. You have to launch PowerShell as an administrator, otherwise the access will be denied. You can do so by right-clicking PowerShell and selecting "Run as administrator." Then, you would want to paste the following: Get-Item "$env:ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\Windows.db" -Force | Select-Object Name, @{n='MB';e={[math]::Round($_.Length/1MB,2)}} If you see a few hundred megabytes, it's safe to assume that it's functioning as it should be. Mine fluctuates from anywhere between 449-500MB against nearly 200,000 indexed items, which works out to under 2.6KB per indexed file. That being said, a couple of gigabytes is still nothing to worry about on a machine with a large document collection. Anything past that, though, is worth looking into. What to do when you have an unusually large Windows.db file There's a fix, and it's simpler than you'd think If you find that you have a bloated Windows.db file on your Windows 11 device, the simplest fix is to rebuild the search index, and it's simple because Windows literally has a button for it. That being said, it could be a little hard to find. Here's how you can navigate to the option. On your desktop, press Windows + R. This should open the Run dialogue box. Type in control srchadmin.dll. This opens an Indexing Options window. Click Advanced at the bottom of the window, and approve the administrator prompt. On the Index Settings tab, find the Troubleshooting section and click on Rebuild. Finally, click OK to confirm. Upon doing this, you may receive a warning from Windows stating that search results may be incomplete as the rebuilding process runs. This is fine as long as you're not relying on search during this time, but besides that, you can continue using your PC as usual. For me, the entire process took about twenty minutes. Once the Indexing Options window reports that indexing has been completed, you can run the size command from earlier again to check if the size of Windows.db has gone down. Your indexing mode decides how much of your PC ends up in that database Classic covers a handful of folders, Enhanced covers a lot more Windows 11 currently offers two indexing modes, and knowing the difference is crucial to understanding how big the index gets, and why. These two modes are Classic and Enhanced, and there's a vast difference between what the two index on your PC. When it comes to Classic mode, which is enabled by default, your Documents, Pictures, and Music folders, including the Desktop, are indexed. Enhanced, on the other hand, searches "your entire PC", as Windows 11 itself specifies in the settings. There's an option to add exclusions with both the options, however. The size difference between the two modes is worth knowing. My index sits at 504MB across nearly 100,000 indexed items, and when I switched to enhanced, the item count passed 199,000 within the hour and amounted to 604MB. This doesn't seem like a lot, but on other PCs with a large number of files, that number can potentially increase much more. That being said, there's a chance that you could see an unusually large size on Windows.db even in the default Classic mode if puts constantly changing files inside those folders, especially if your workflow involves working with virtual environments, with Classic mode indexing far more than expected. The reason behind this is that Classic mode's scope is defined by location rather than by size. A virtual machine image or a synced cloud folder sitting in Documents is inside the index either way, and because Windows Search re-reads a file every time it changes, any rewrites will constantly generate fresh work. Community guides on indexing list virtual machines, node_modules and large media libraries among some of the folders worth excluding for exactly this reason. Additionally, Microsoft themselves state that on PCs with more than 400,000 search items, one can begin to see performance issues. The indexer itself tops out around a million, beyond which Microsoft says it may fail outright or cause high CPU, memory, or disk usage. These are some figures worth keeping in mind while adding to the list of exclusions and going over your indexed items. On PCs with more than 400,000 search items, one can begin to see performance issues. The indexer itself tops out around a million, beyond which Microsoft says it may fail outright or cause high CPU, memory, or disk usage. Managing your storage shouldn't be this complicated A database that can potentially grow up to hundreds of gigabytes should not be invisible in Settings, unreadable without admin rights, and reachable only through an obscure Run command that most people would not be familiar with, and yet, somehow this is the state of Windows 11. Fortunately, most of that can be fixed with one step of diagnosis through PowerShell and another step rebuilding the search index.