How do I force eject an external drive when Finder or other applications are using it on MacBook Pro?

hootboot wrote:

Finder is using it.

Quite frequently I have to force quit applications to eject an external drive, (any external drive) either finder is using it or some other application. Force ejecting is the only option as I cannot seem to find anything active. Currently running Tahoe 26.4 on my MacBook Pro.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: Force ejecting

There is no harm in making multiple attempts to eject

You can try relaunching the Finder on the fly >Force Quit>Finder>Relaunch

if you have an on going issue—

From the Terminal app you can see what has it tied up... typical: Spotlight, launchd...

copy and paste:

diskutil umount  

notice the trailing blank space, now drag & drop the drive icon onto the Terminal window to complete the path

the ex. would be diskutil umount /Volumes/Untitled\ 1

if no insight or resolve— you can force unmount

diskutil unmountDisk force 

same drag & drop drill as above

example only:

Adding to Grant's good advice ... I have seen two situations where there is a delay in ejecting an external drive. One is when a program like SuperDuper (which basically clones your one drive to another, making a mirror image type of copy of the original drive) has just finished a backup. I am surmising that the delay is due to some sort of "clean up" on that target drive. The other is when a program like Photoshop has just finished working on a large number of image files on the external that one is trying to eject. Again, there may be some Lightroom catalog finalizing bookkeeping going on behind the scenes for a short time.

In each of the above, the delay before eject is possible but is usually brief, maybe seconds to as long as a couple of minutes, but it takes longer on slower, older Macs (I sometimes use a 2015 iMac and a 2013 Macbook Air). Sometimes a Spotlight index is being updated with new files just saved on the external drive; that should not take long but even when that indexing is interrupted with an eject request, it may need to close some things out in an orderly way. I think it best to allow these processes to complete in an orderly way rather than "force eject."

If you just don't have time to wait, e.g. you need to pack up the laptop and go with it somewhere, I think a better approach is to just shut down the laptop. Then all external devices are disconnected in a proper way.

Likliest culprit is Spotlight which might be indexing the drive. Add the drive to privacy in Spotlight to stop that.

Run Terminal and type "sudo lsof" then a space (no quotes) then drag the drive into terminal and hit enter. It will ask for you password so type it (nothing will appear on the screen), hit enter and it will tell you which apps are using it. This might be useful but it might need some googling to work out what the apps are. mds is related to spotlight.

Or run Terminal and type "drutil eject" (no quotes) to force eject it. In theory you shouldn't force eject cos you don't really know what's going on but if you've successfully done everything you want, the files are on the drive and the bus is due then you might not have much choice. There's a small risk of losing stuff, but I never have.

Finder does not lock up your drives so that they cannot be ejected.

Only when other Apps or background processes have opened files on the drive is ejecting inhibited.

By far the easiest way to cause poor performance, instability, overheating and crashing is to install ANY third-party speeder-uppers, Cleaners, Optimizers, Third-party Virus scanners, Bit Torrent, or a VPN that you installed yourself. They are relentless in scanning your files, non-stop, looking for virus-like patterns in Everything, or looking for files that have changed. When completed, they do it all again.

¿Are you running anything like that?

do you have a finder window open on that Drive?

are you using "optimize Storage' (onto iCloud) for that drive?

Optimize storage space on your Mac - Apple Support