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I usually have a lot of external drives connected to my MacBook, such as flash drives, hard drives, and SD cards. It so happens that I need to eject them quite often.

The usual way I eject these is by either showing the desktop using a shortcut and dragging the drives I want to eject to the trash, or navigating to the finder and ejecting the drives from there, or by using a script which ejects all my external drives at once. However, when I want to do something simple like ejecting a flash drive or SD card (which I do quite often) I'd prefer not to break my workflow and simply be able to, say, click on a menu bar icon and select which volume I want to eject.

I haven't yet seen a utility which can achieve this. Does anyone know of one?

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  • 1
    I find selecting the icon and Cmd+E works well : either for a single or multiple icons...
    – Solar Mike
    Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 4:57
  • That's a good idea, but I'm looking for something which does not require me to take an extra step to show my desktop/switch to another "space" and potentially disrupt my workflow (so a menu bar solution would be ideal)
    – Oion Akif
    Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 5:26
  • No problem - only made the comment as when I use it sometimes some colleagues are so surprised!!!
    – Solar Mike
    Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 5:37
  • No worries, it's very useful! Actually it's a much better method than dragging. I use ⌘E as a system-wide shortcut and I attempted to remap it with Monomeeth's help. However, I just realized that with BetterTouchTool it's possible to use a wildcard, e.g. Eject* and assign that menu bar action to some other shortcut!
    – Oion Akif
    Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 5:56

6 Answers 6

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As Semulov is in maintainable mode, there is a paid alternative that works good for me: Jettison

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  • It seems like this is the only app which is up to date and contains the features of all the older apps combined, so I'm marking this as the answer.
    – Oion Akif
    Commented Feb 16, 2021 at 19:48
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Try Semulov - it is designed to eject volumes from the menu bar. The author has even made the source available on GitHub.

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macOS included a built in menu bar item to eject removable drives. LifeWire has done a much better job than I could do providing instructions on how to add this to your Mac's menu bar.

Check it out here: Add a Menu Bar Item to Eject a CD or DVD

Update: This answer is incorrect. While macOS includes an eject menu, it can only eject optical discs.

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  • It's true that they do, but this is only for "ejecting CD or DVD drives" unfortunately. This would be a perfect solution, if only it supported external drives.
    – Oion Akif
    Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 4:42
  • @SkeletonBow To my understanding this does support external drives. If that is not correct, I will remove this answer.
    – Jake3231
    Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 4:43
  • The article you liked does call it an "Eject CD/DVD menu item" and also states that it is used to "eject or insert a CD or DVD." I additionally can't see any external drives when I click on it :P
    – Oion Akif
    Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 5:27
  • Oh, and you should keep this answer as it answers part of the question. Someone may find it useful
    – Oion Akif
    Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 16:08
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    @SkeletonBow I have updated the answer.
    – Jake3231
    Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 16:09
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Try Mountain. http://appgineers.de/mountain/ Not only does it allow you to mount and eject drives, you can select to not mount a drive on restart. I unmount a drive after cloning and don't want it mounted again on restart. This app does exactly what I want.

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  • Look like it hasn't been updated in four years at this point
    – Oion Akif
    Commented Feb 16, 2021 at 19:44
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The Finder eject shortcut is Cmd+e, e for eject, easy!

This also works on the desktop. Click/select the drive, mash Cmd+e, give it a couple seconds to disappear, done!

Note that this also works if you have a Finder window open to any folder on an external drive, Cmd+e and it will eject that drive.

If it’s a multi-partition drive, add Shift to eject the whole disk device rather than just the single partition.

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Elgato makes a dock eject utility for their Thunderbolt dock, which really only makes sense in context to disks. I don’t know if it’s somehow exclusive to use with their dock, but worth a look for a quick access eject utility.

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