So I’m setting up my laptop as my primary workstation but will generally be working on a studio display and using it as a dock.
I’ve been a desktop guy for a while.
I seem to remember some discussion of some sort of app or utility to make sure that external hard drives are dismounted when unplugging my laptop. Could not find it when searching the Forum. Any suggestions on how to avoid accidentally unplugging without unmounting first?
Other World Computing has a nifty little ejection utility that they advertise for use with their docks. I do have a couple of their docks – but sometimes I have disks directly plugged in to my thunderbolt/USB-C ports, and it seems to work just as well for them.
It’s free, so probably worth checking out:
I’ve been using Jettison recently which works well but for some reason doesn’t register SD cards. External drives show up as they should and it’s really handy to have an eject button straight in the menu bar. I wish that all external storage could be ejected with the same app - I still end up manually ejecting the SD through the Photos app or in Finder.
I find that Jettison sometimes tries and tries to eject a disk when told to do so. Sometimes never seems to succeed and I have to use Activity Monitor to kill it. Force Quit on the Apple Menu doesn’t do it. Sometimes even have to re-boot the machine. Not my favorite app.
I use Ejectify for this; having the menu bar trigger is very useful. Looks like Jettison has more functionality but I prefer using the eject button rather than relying on rules etc…
Of course it all depends on your definition of “unplugging my laptop”, but if it is what I think it is, this seems like a mission impossible. The moment you unplug your laptop, the connection is broken and there is no way to unmount anything connected to that monitor or dock anymore.
If by “unplugging my laptop” you mean “switchting it off”, it’s a different story of course. Then there is an event software can act upon.
There is a setting specifically that must be turned on to eject SD cards. I don’t rely on it. I eject an SD card manually as soon as I’ve gotten what I need off of it. These devices are so fragile in my experience and so vital to my cameras working properly that I baby them to an extreme.
Settings for the Jettison app are complicated because of the wide variety and quality of devices we plug in, the variety of hardware and software interfaces that must be accommodated, and the interplay with macOS over the years as its support for external storage devices has changed.
I keep my use of external drives as simple as possible and find I have to play with the Jettison settings until I stop having problems for my particular set of devices and my sleep, shutdown, and disconnect practices.
I don’t think there are, actually, a lot of pertinent Jettison settings. I can think of more needed, e.g. a timeout for when it can’t eject something. I have had a lot of “play time” and I continue to do so. Oh well.
If any of my settings (see below) are widely out of step, let me know!
I use keyboard maestro for this. When I want to undock I have an series of actions that ejects my drives and closes certain apps.
Triggered by a button on the stream deck.
I don’t “Reload driver to remount flash drives.” I don’t use hotkeys. I only eject Hard Disks.
But I can’t say my settings are right or that yours are wrong.
I figure the lack of settings that I think are missing may be due to APIs that Apple does not provide or make public.
The bottom line is that my two Macs run better with Jettison than without.
I use Alfred for unmounting.
It’s quick and easy: Cmd-Space to invoke Alfred, then I start typing the word “eject.” The “eject all” command usually pops up by the time I’ve typed the “j” in “eject.”
Same here, although I also have a BetterTouchTool button on my MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar which will (mostly) do the same thing via a script I wrote.
I use Alfred. Someone mentioned that it has a built in eject feature. It is easy to attach a keyboard command (I use
Option shift 1). This means you do not even have to invoke Alfred to eject all. For it works on all external drives including SDs.
