Can someone recommend a good 'disk eject' app?

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

I'm having some issues with my Time Machine external drive, which requires me to manually unmount the drive in Disk Utility to end activity.

I was wondering if anyone had some good recommendations for a disk ejecting app that I can keep in the menu bar? Thanks.

 

[bogdanw]

Semulov “Access mounted and unmounted volumes from the menubar”
https://github.com/kainjow/Semulov/releases/latest

MountMate “A simple macOS menu bar app to manage your external drives”
https://github.com/homielab/mountmate/releases/latest

Disk Arbitrator “A Mac OS X forensic utility which manages file system mounting in support of forensic procedures.”
https://github.com/aburgh/Disk-Arbitrator/releases/latest

 

[!!!]

Often times I find spamming CMD-E with the drive selected in Finder will eventually get it to be removed. Or you can run diskutil unmountDisk force diskXsY to forcibly unmount it.

Keep in mind, though, that the OS may actually be doing something. I find that TM drives can take a while to eject, likely because the OS has additional housekeeping to do, with regards to spotlight/fsevents/time machine itself.

 

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

Many thanks guys!

The reason I want to ‘force’ it to unmount is because I use a MBP, so it’s not always convenient to keep the drive plugged in. It can take a long time to back up, and even when it’s done and I eject it via the right-click option (and it disappears from the desktop), the drive light stops ‘reading/writing’, but I can still hear and feel activity in the drive.

Perhaps in partly to blame as I only back up about one every 5 days.

 

[Petite messe solennelle]

When you eject an external drive but you do not unplug it, it is still spinning (assuming it is a hard disk since you say you feel activity). In such a case you can just unplug it – there is no way the spinning can be stopped with software.

Maybe buy an external SSD with a fast connection (especially should you have a newer MBP). They are not that expensive anymore. I deal with a lot of large image files and time machine does not take long.

Also, have enough space free on that external drive. Time Machine will remove old changes, which can take quite a while. If there is a lot of free space it will not do it on every backup execution.