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external hard drive

How do I safely remove an external hard drive from my macbook pro 2020...do I drag its symbol on my desktop to the trash and then unplug it or do I just shutdown and unplug it then?

thanks...

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 12.6

Posted on Jan 14, 2023 4:02 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jan 14, 2023 4:17 PM

when the Mac first came out, ejecting a disk was more intuitive.


You dragged the disk icon to the Trash, and if it was an ejectable drive, a ghostly image of the drive remained, which you could also drag to the trash when you were done, or it would mount quickly later if you re-inserted the drive.


Today's shortcut has been shortened to drag disk to Trash, it ejects and you are done. That is not as nice because other things you drag to the Trash you want gone forever. (There is a subtle little touch that the Trash sometimes momentarily becomes an Eject icon in certain cases.)


The process of Ejecting a drive writes the 'checked out' RAM copy of the Directory back to the drive and marks the directory as checked back in, so the drive will be mounted without issue later.


You can shutdown, which will also check back in the RAM copy of the Directory, but it is unnecessarily cautious.


You can also plug/unplug displays 'live' although that makes some people cringe.

7 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jan 14, 2023 4:17 PM in response to taloolahtoo

when the Mac first came out, ejecting a disk was more intuitive.


You dragged the disk icon to the Trash, and if it was an ejectable drive, a ghostly image of the drive remained, which you could also drag to the trash when you were done, or it would mount quickly later if you re-inserted the drive.


Today's shortcut has been shortened to drag disk to Trash, it ejects and you are done. That is not as nice because other things you drag to the Trash you want gone forever. (There is a subtle little touch that the Trash sometimes momentarily becomes an Eject icon in certain cases.)


The process of Ejecting a drive writes the 'checked out' RAM copy of the Directory back to the drive and marks the directory as checked back in, so the drive will be mounted without issue later.


You can shutdown, which will also check back in the RAM copy of the Directory, but it is unnecessarily cautious.


You can also plug/unplug displays 'live' although that makes some people cringe.

external hard drive

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