X

5 ways to eject an external drive from a Mac

Pick your favorite way to eject disk volumes from your Mac and put an end to the Disk Not Ejected Properly warnings.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
Matt Elliott
Sarah Tew/CNET

Whenever I connect my Nikon dSLR to my MacBook to grab photos off of it, the Photos app doesn't let me eject the drive. It offers a small eject button on the Import tab but the button rarely if ever registers my furious clicks. Thankfully, there are other ways to eject an external storage device from a Mac. I count five, to be exact. Any of which will help you avoid this stern warning from MacOS:

disk-not-ejected-properly.jpg
Matt Elliott/CNET

1. Right-click desktop icon

Any external volume connected to your Mac shows up on your desktop. Right-click the volume and choose Eject "volume name."

right-click-eject.jpg
Matt Elliott/CNET


2. Drag to trash can

You can drag the desktop icon for an external volume and drop it on the trash can in the Dock. The trash can turns into a giant eject button when you start dragging the volume across the desktop to show that you aren't trashing its contents but merely ejecting the volume from your Mac.

3. Finder sidebar

An external volume connected to your Mac also shows up on the Finder sidebar under the Devices header. If you are already using Finder and want to eject an external volume, just click the little eject button next to the volume listed on the sidebar.

finder-eject.jpg
Matt Elliott/CNET

4. File > Eject

Select the volume and from the Finder menu, choose File > Eject "volume name."

finder-file-eject.jpg
Matt Elliott/CNET


5. Command-E

With the volume selected, you can also use the keyboard shortcut Command-E to eject it.

For more, here's all you need to know about MacOS Sierra.