I have a Samsung T7 Shield external hard drive that’s about 2.5 years old. Recently, when attempting to eject it, I receive this message: “T7 Shield wasn’t ejected because one or more programs may be using it.” I end up using the Force Eject option on the message. Does anyone know what would cause this error message?
The error message indicates that an application did not yet completely close its access to a file on the external hard drive. The error message serves as a warning that you may have an application opened and that application is viewing a file on the drive. You should not eject the drive until after you close the file within the application. The error message serves as a warning that an application that you had been using to access a file on the drive has not yet completed its closing process steps even though you closed the document from that application. You should not eject the drive until after you quit the application. Finally, the error message may indicate that an application that has accessed a file on the external drive has not given up its access to that file even though the application is not “active” by any measure that you believe. A possible culprit for this case is Spotlight. In such a case, you may have to track down the problem to prevent it from re-occuring every time you mount the drive.
One hint: Disable Spotlight indexing on the external drive. Unmount the drive, remove it, and restart to clear the Spotlight cache.
Another hint: Rather than opening a file that is on the drive, copy the file that you want to open onto your desktop and work with it from there.
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JJW
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I don’t want to distract from more responses, but given the lovely generic title to the thread, along with the pretty complete-looking answer to the OP, I’d like to inject my own External Hard Drive Question. Protocol violation? Not sure. In any case, my bus-powered HDD runs fine through the Mac Mini USB 2 port, but clicks worryingly when plugged into my USB hub. I assume it’s a power issue, but don’t know for sure. Sadly, the Mac mini only has one open port, so using this drive involves swapping I’d rather avoid. Is this standard and just something to live with? Now back to your regular programming…