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I have setup Fast Search for SharePoint 2010 as a stand alone server and I have ran the full crawl of my sharepoint sites. I don't see any index files on my fast server. Is all the indexed content reside in the database? If yes then why is the recommended disk space for fast server is 1TB on microsoft site? If not where can I find the index files?

Thanks, Michael

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4 Answers 4

By default the FAST would store index file(s) on file system and the location would be: [InstallPath]\Data\Data_index

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I had multiple Call's with Microsoft on FAST Search Index size they recommended us atleast 800GB based on 2 Million Items we are crawling. However we are only using 300GB. They stated that Index will never go in SQL. However my gut feeling is it is stored in SQL.

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FAST Search stores its raw crawling data on the hard drive as it is indexing the content. Then as the processing jobs run, it adds the records to the SQL database and removes the data from the hard drive.

So, the reason for so much disk space needed on the FAST server is for temporary use during crawling.

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FAST search for Sharepoint will store all the indices on the hard drive under


There is no index on any relational DB!

Before the final index (i.e. Binary format) it has an intermediary index as well, which is stored in XML files g-zipped under


All the above theories & gut feelings aren't valid.

It's a lot different than SharePoint server 2010 and therefore is more optimized and performs better.

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