You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
I purchased a Samsung T7 external drive. The drive wont eject from my Macbook Pro 2019. Reached out to Samsung and they suggested to reach out to Apple. Any thoughts why the drive won't eject?
[Re-Titled By Moderator]
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 15.1
Ok, let's try something a bit simplier.
I would like for you to enter the following command in the Terminal app:
Replace YourDriveName with the name of your external drive as it appears in Finder under Locations. This command searches for any open files or processes accessing files on that drive.
Review the output. It will show a list of processes, including the process ID (PID), the command name, and the file or resource being accessed.
You can now try "killing" a process to see which one is keeping you from ejecting the drive.
The command for that is: kill -9 PID
Replace PID with the process ID of the process accessing the drive.
Lastly, if you find the process holding the drive is Spotlight indexing, you may want to temporarily disable Spotlight for that drive instead of killing processes: sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/YourDriveName
I appreciate the help. For earlier macOS releases and up to Sequoia 15.0 I believed it worked fine (meaning I could eject it without having to shut down the computer).
I tried the Activity Monitor app, looking at the Disks tab, but it seems like thousands of processes/apps are trying to access the drive (if I am reading this correctly) and the numbers fluctuate back and froth.
Not sure where to go from here...
*See image attached (not sure if this helps).
I appreciate the help. For earlier macOS releases and up to Sequoia 15.0 I believed it worked fine (meaning I could eject it without having to shut down the computer).
I tried the Activity Monitor app, looking at the Disks tab, but it seems like thousands of processes/apps are trying to access the drive (if I am reading this correctly) and the numbers fluctuate back and froth.
Not sure where to go from here...
*See image attached (not sure if this helps).
Let's start with how exactly are you trying to eject this drive from your Mac? Is your Mac still running macOS Sequoia 15.1? ... or have you updated it to 15.1.1?
Did this work before or has never worked with this Mac?
Hello! Let me give you all the details...
I have tried a few ways to eject it:
1. Simply right clicking on the external drive desktop icon and choosing "eject". (Does not work)
2. Dragging the external drive desktop icon into the trash. (Does not work either)
3. Going into disk utility and choosing "unmount" for the external drive. (Does not work either)
Not sure if there is another way to eject the external hard drive, I open to suggestions. The only thing that seems to work is to turn the Macbook Pro off and then eject the hard drive safely. I always get the same old message that the external drive cannot be ejected because it is used by an application, although no application is ever running when I try to eject the external drive.
To answer the second part of your question: It has worked fine before. I also assumed that maybe it is due to updating to Sequoia. I am currently on macOS Sequoia 15.1.1.
I contacted Samsung and I was told to contact Apple to resolve this, as they couldn't.
Btw there are multiple threads online of hundreds of people having the same issue. No answer to be found yet. If you can help I would greatly appreciate it :)
When it was working, I'm assuming that was with an earlier macOS release, like Sonoma or Ventura ... correct? ... or was that with Sequoia 15.0, 15.0.1, or 15.1?
Regardless, it is certainly possible the update to 15.1.1 introduced this issue.
As far as other methods to eject a disk ... no, you pretty much exhausted all of them that I'm aware of.
From my experience, this issue often arises when background processes or applications are accessing the drive, even if they're not immediately visible. The key, in this case, it to see what those might be. This is where the Activity Monitor app should come in handy. I suggest using it with the Disks tab open to see what processes/apps are trying to access this drive.
If you find any that are, try stopping them one at a time, checking to see if you can eject the drive after each one.
Unable to eject Samsung T7 external drive from my MacBook Pro
