Ever since upgrading my MacStudio to MacOS 15 Sequoia, I now have to force eject my external NVMe drive to eject it.
I thought this might be unique to this computer so I tried it at home on my brand new Mac Mini M4 Pro and it is the same there.
Is there something causing this?
David
Mac Studio
The first thing you do when you mount an external drive is to visit System Settings > Spotlight and add that drive to the Spotlight Privacy panel so it won't be indexed. Then you can eject it normally providing nothing else is accessing content on the drive.
The first thing you do when you mount an external drive is to visit System Settings > Spotlight and add that drive to the Spotlight Privacy panel so it won't be indexed. Then you can eject it normally providing nothing else is accessing content on the drive.
The usual suspects are Spotlight and Photos indexing background tasks. You might try to force-quit them via the Activity Monitor (before they re-launch again...) and eject. But I usually just save and quit any of my apps that have open important documents and force-eject with no ill effects so far (knock on wood). If I want to be more safe, I might even reboot or shutdown and then power of the external device. FWIW AFAIR Windows nowadays force-ejects by default but I have not checked that side lately.
I also cannot eject my external NVMe drive after upgrade to Sequoia yesterday; in Terminal, sudo lsof shows it is being accessed by Spotlight. I cannot add it to the Spotlight exceptions. Any suggestions?
If you are using Time Machine, it requires the use of Spotlight.
That's great advice Mat and Viking, I have added all my drives to the Exclusion List in Spotlight. Let's see if that fixes the problem.
In fact I prefer to use HoudahSpot rather than Spotlight so maybe I can disable Spotlight entirely?
I don't use TimeMachine as I prefer Carbon Copy Cloner.
MacOS 15 Sequoia means external drive needs to be force eject...
