The reason for indexing in Windows was so that searching NTFS volumes using Windows NTx.x didn't seem that much slower than searching FAT32 volumes when using W

The reason for indexing in Windows was so that searching NTFS volumes using Windows NTx.x didn't seem that much slower than searching FAT32 volumes when using W9x where there was no need for indexing. And that was on hardware which was orders of magnitude slower, both processor and HDD. People probably haven't benchmarked this on 21st century hardware in a while. It can be amazing what a single 2GHz core can do when you give it a chance.