The eternal question is what’s the right way to remove stick drives and other external storage devices on your Mac. We stand for the importance of ensuring proper removal.

Why? Let me tell you all about it.

The most important reason is that when an external drive is connected to a Mac, the system mounts its image first and only then provides access to its contents. For this reason it is always recommended to ensure proper removal of the device, thus disabling the mounted image of the device. Otherwise, if you just pull the Flash Drive out, it may lead to undesirable consequences—the loss of data.

Proper stick drive removal can be done in several ways that we’ll explain to you below.

The simplest ways of proper external drive removal

Hotkeys

This method will definitely appeal to fans of Hotkeys. So just by pressing Cmnd+E, you can ensure your flash drive’s safe removal.

Dragging and dropping

All users’ favorite! All the devices that you plug in create a desktop shortcut. To safely remove the drive, just grab the shortcut and drag it to Trash. When you’re dragging the shortcut icon, the Trash icon will change to the Eject icon. Drop the shortcut into the modified Trash and voila, the flash drive is removed from the system.

Dropdown menu

This way is no more complicated than the previous ones. Right-click on the drive icon you created and select Eject from the dropdown menu.

The least user-friendly way

Since we list all the possible ways to safely remove an external drive, we cannot ignore the least user-friendly one.

You need to go to Finder, find Disk Utility in Applications, and open it.

Then find the USB flash drive you need on the left side of the window that opens, right-click on it, select Eject, then remove the drive.

Using Finder

This one is just as simple. Finder always displays all connected devices in the sidebar, with the eject button next to each. Just click on it and remove the flash drive.

Why my flash drive won’t be removed

Sometimes, a flash drive won’t be removed or disconnected. Usually this happens when it is used by an application. Close the application and try to remove the flash drive again. If that doesn’t help, try restarting your Mac and start over using any of the proposed methods.

Monitoring external drive performance with CleanMyDrive 2

This app will help you ensure safe use of external devices, as well as monitor the amount of free disk space.

Start by downloading the CleanMyDrive 2 (it’s totally free).

After the installation, the utility icon appears in the menu bar.

The application displays all the plugged-in drives. It also displays the amount of used disk space on each drive in color code. If you hover the cursor on a particular color in the scale, you can see exactly what type of files they are and how much disk space they occupy.

Clearing junk from an external drive with CleanMyDrive 2

One of CleanMyDrive 2’s useful features is clearing junk. Using the color scale described above, you will see how much disk space is taken by junk. The utility uses a special algorithm to determine it. The app gives you an immediate opportunity to get rid of it by simply clicking Clean.

Safely removing a flash drive and other external drives with CleanMacDrive 2

Let’s take a look at another way to safely remove external drives with CleanMyDrive 2. To make using it simple, the developers have come up with a separate Eject button on the right side. Click on it to safely remove all external drives. We can also eject all the plugged-in drives simultaneously simply by pressing Eject All.

CleanMyDrive 2 provides the option to clean drives of junk manually or automatically, to remove drives with one click, using the dropdown box. For more information about this small but very useful utility, read our article dedicated to CleanMacDrive 2.

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