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How do I eject a USB disk drive?

Not to sound like a complete chowderhead, but when I have a USB disk drive hooked up to my Mac and then unplug it, I always get a scary warning. How do I avoid that and eject the drive properly before unplugging it?


Dave's Answer:

First off, repeat after me "just because it's the computer for the rest of us doesn't mean that it always makes sense". That can be your mantra for this particular adventure. :-)

Actually I have always found the disk eject mechanism in Mac OS X to be rather confusing, whether it's a DVD or CD disk, digital camera, or USB drive. Given the common visual metaphor of a tiny "x" circle on the top left of icons to delete the particular item. See Dashboard widgets, for example, or Apple's iPhone icons.

I can't fix the operating system, however, so instead I'll simply explain how you're supposed to eject the drive rather than just yank that baby outta the USB port. Oh, and why is it a problem? Because the operating system keeps a "cache", an image or copy of a portion of the drive's data in computer memory and writes it to disk (this is called "syncing") every so often, not instantly. Unplug it just before one of these sync events and the data on the drive could theoretically be out of date and incorrect.

So here's the dialog box you must be seeing when you pull your USB drive:

Mac OS X: USB Device Drive Removal Error

You can actually read the dialog box and follow it, but there are two easier ways to eject a USB device or drive in Mac OS X that'll make your life quite a bit easier.

Option one is to drag the device to the trashcan. Yes, don't panic, it's not indicating that you want the Mac operating system to reformat the device or wipe it clean, but rather the trashcan switches to a weird triangle icon instead, as you can see here when I drag my Corsair drive:

Mac OS X: USB Device Drive Removal: Dragging to the Trashcan

That's how I remove devices on my own Mac systems, since it's so darn easy, even if it's a bit confusing to people who haven't tried it before.

Option two, however, is a bit more logical if you're still jumpy about dragging your device to the trash. Ctrl-click on the device icon instead, and check out the options that appear:

Mac OS X: USB Device Drive Removal: Ctrl-Clicking to Eject

As highlighted, you want to choose "Eject" and you're done.

Either way, these both give you easy options to eject any sort of USB disk drive, digital camera, personal media player, or similar.



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Comments

Another option is to the go to the Finder window and click on the arrow next to the device

Posted by: Ras at January 26, 2008 2:21 PM

Dave, great job in putting together this list of instructions. I cannot stress enough to my clients, how important it is to safely remove a device from their system. Even if it is just a USB drive and may seem a bit tedious, it sure beats losing 1GB of precious data. It happened to me... I had to learn the hard way.

Posted by: Monchster at February 14, 2008 8:23 PM

For some reason, the icon for my Memorex mini travel drive is not showing up on my computer when I plug it into the USB port, so I can't access the info on it. But when I pull it out (b/c there's no icon to drag to trash and it doesn't acknowledge it under File), I still get that message that I removed it improperly. Please help!!

Posted by: LindaL at March 4, 2008 8:01 PM

For some reason mine gives the unsafe device removal warning even after I've 'ejected' the drive in finder.

If I wait a minute or so _after_ the volume is dismounted it no longer throws the warning, but for some reason it still seems to see the device as plugged in.

Posted by: Morgan at March 23, 2008 3:52 PM

I have a lot to say, but ...
Starbucks coffee cup I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!









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