Since I encrypted my external hard drive it does not stop running after I press eject. It disappears from the sidebar in Finder but it does not stop running. I have removed it and connected it again several times and the same thing happens every time. Can this be harmful for the drive or is it ok to remove it even though it is still running? Is there anyway to fix this so that it stops running when ejected? Or is there another safe way to remove it if eject does not work? I have a MacBook Pro with OS X 10.9.5.
1 Answer
As long as your volume is unmounted, whether or your drive is spinning doesn't matter. The drive will usually spin down on its own depending on when it's set to "go to sleep."
When you eject, you have successfully unmounted the drive.
If you wish to confirm, in terminal, just issue the command mount. If you don't see the volume name of the drive you had mounted previously, you can consider it unmounted.
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Thank you! I issued the command "mount" in terminal and I could not find the hard drive there after ejecting it so I guess that it works. Do you have any idea why it's functioning seems to have changed in this way after I encrypted it? Earlier it always stopped spinning more or less immediately after I ejected it but now it does not stop spinning at all, or at least not in a few minutes after ejecting it. Commented Jul 2, 2016 at 5:36