External Drives - Unmounting vs Ejecting

[Reimer]

Can anyone explain the difference?

I have two USB drives connected to a Macbook Pro. One for Time Machine and the other as a storage drive.

I put the MBP to sleep every night so I've always ejected the drives beforehand since I've read this is what you're supposed to do in case of issues with sleeping, data loss, etc.

Or is it enough to just unmount? Both drives are encrypted so I typically have to enter the password every time I unlock them in Disk Utility

 

[Garsun]

As far as I know it's all the same for a single partition drive.

Also as long as you don't physically unplug them during sleep I beleve OS X handles sleeping external drives without issues. Not that I have tried it recently.

Hopefully someone with a bit more experience will reply with perhaps better advice soon

 

[The-Pro]

you can leave them connected without problems when you put your computer to sleep. OSX will just make the drives sleep (spin them down) aswell and they will be woken up again when you wake up the computer. there is no chance of loosing any data. I do this daily.
you only need to eject the drives if you are unplugging the drives from the computer

 

[Fishrrman]

OP:
If you just want to "unmount" the drives -- that is, remove them from the desktop, but DO NOT actually disconnect them from the computer -- you might try something called Semulov to do this:
http://www.kainjow.com

Very handy little app -- resides in right-hand menu bar.
You can dismount volumes by name, and after the MacBook wakes up, you should be able to RE-mount them, as well.