macos – Spotlight (mds) preventing unmounting external drive to run Disk Utility scan

I’m trying to run Disk Utility scan on an external drive. Disk Utility reports the drive is in use. lsof reveals that it is.

% sudo lsof /Volumes/mydrive
COMMAND  PID USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF    NODE NAME
mds     1233 root    6r   DIR   1,24     1020       2 /Volumes/mydrive
mds     1233 root   20r   DIR   1,24     3468 2886959 /Volumes/mydrive/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/01234578-9012-3456-7890-123456789012
% sudo kill -9 1233         

However, I cannot get to Disk Utility fast enough before mds gets started again. Mac OS 14.1 on an M2 Mini.

How do I run a Disk Utility scan?

For reference:

% man mds | cat
MDS(8)                      System Manager's Manual                     MDS(8)

NAME
     mds – metadata server

SYNOPSIS
     mds

DESCRIPTION
     mds is the metadata server.  It serves all clients of the metadata APIs,
     including Spotlight.

     There are no configurations to mds, and users should not run mds
     manually.

SEE ALSO
     mdfind(1), mdls(1), mdutil(1)

Mac OS X                       January 19, 2006                       Mac OS X

edit: I did check System Preferences, but I don’t see any way to disable Spotlight or the metadata server entirely. Unchecking options for what Spotlight should search doesn’t seem to change how Spotlight works, anyway. Web searches on how to disable Spotlight find results that basically are quite old, say it’s a really bad idea to do it, or both.