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Dr. McKay

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 20, 2010
821
112
Belgium, Europe
I have three external discs, a Western Digital 2Tb HDD, a 500 Gb Samsung T5 SSD and a 500 Gb Samsung T7.
I've noticed that when ejecting either of these discs takes at least 10 to 15 seconds before the drive disappears form the desktop, where as with previous versions of MacOS, it only took a second or two.

Anyone else experience this ?
 

jz0309

Contributor
Sep 25, 2018
11,329
29,903
SoCal
I have three external discs, a Western Digital 2Tb HDD, a 500 Gb Samsung T5 SSD and a 500 Gb Samsung T7.
I've noticed that when ejecting either of these discs takes at least 10 to 15 seconds before the drive disappears form the desktop, where as with previous versions of MacOS, it only took a second or two.

Anyone else experience this ?
I have 5 externals and don’t see this behavior, takes maybe 2-3 sec… what Mac?
 

Dr. McKay

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 20, 2010
821
112
Belgium, Europe
I have a 2017 27 inch iMac (i5, 32Gb of RAM, 512 GB SSD) and a 2015 15 inch Macbook Pro (i7, 16Gb of RAM, 512Gb SSD), same behaviour on both Macs...
In some instances, it's faster than others, but it never is nowhere near as quick as on previous versions of Mac OS.
To be honest, on High Sierra, it almost ejects instantly (still use a High Sierra session on the Samsung T5 and when I use external discs with that OS, there's no delay) ; I remember Mojave behaving the same as High Sierra.
To be honest, Catalina was somewhat slower to eject discs, but it could be my imagination.

Big Sur, however, very very slow. Sometimes they don't eject at all and I get the message that the disc is still in use. Could it be an indexing problem ? Difficult to believe, reallly, the external 2TB HDD is connected all the time on my imac as half of it has a partition for Time Machine, the other 1Tb is a backup for older files I rarely use.

I'm a bit puzzled...

Edit : no difference between connecting the external drives directly to the Mac or through a powered USB3 hub...
 
Last edited:

Apple_Robert

Contributor
Sep 21, 2012
35,576
52,317
In a van down by the river
I often found ejecting drives slow and a lot of times I got the spinning wheel that went no where. I started using an app called "Ejectify" (paid less than $4) for it and now I can eject my drives much faster from my dock.

 
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Apple_Robert

Contributor
Sep 21, 2012
35,576
52,317
In a van down by the river
Is that Ejectify thingy safe ? I mean, isn't what it does merely a 'Force eject' in disguise ?
It is safe. I wouldn't recommend an app I didn't use. I haven't had any problems with it.

If you want to view the source code...

 
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Blowback

macrumors 65816
Jan 10, 2018
1,301
735
VA
I have three external discs, a Western Digital 2Tb HDD, a 500 Gb Samsung T5 SSD and a 500 Gb Samsung T7.
I've noticed that when ejecting either of these discs takes at least 10 to 15 seconds before the drive disappears form the desktop, where as with previous versions of MacOS, it only took a second or two.

Anyone else experience this ?
I use a Samsung T5 SSD for CCC backups....twice a week. Have never experienced this behavior. Also, have several other Samsung SSDs which I connect with occasionally and no such behavior either. A few secs and they are ejected. MBP 2017 with MacOS BS 11.4. Are you sure you don't have something running/'cleaning up' on the drives that has to complete prior to ejection?
 

Dr. McKay

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 20, 2010
821
112
Belgium, Europe
I haven't got any tools running in the background, I just use Mac OS 'as is'...
Can't be the formatting. Internal SSD is APFS, externals are all HFS+. Don't think that could be the problem, either.
 

jwolf6589

macrumors 601
Dec 15, 2010
4,912
1,643
Colorado
I have three external discs, a Western Digital 2Tb HDD, a 500 Gb Samsung T5 SSD and a 500 Gb Samsung T7.
I've noticed that when ejecting either of these discs takes at least 10 to 15 seconds before the drive disappears form the desktop, where as with previous versions of MacOS, it only took a second or two.

Anyone else experience this ?
Yes I experience it as well. Its another of the many bugs in Big Sur.
 

pshufd

macrumors G4
Oct 24, 2013
10,133
14,563
New Hampshire
I've noticed this as well, mainly with my Time Machine drives. I had been checking the connections but it appears that it just takes a long time. One of them is a WD Elements and the other two are WD MyBooks. It's not that big a deal as it's just backup and there's always one disk attached. I generally move files via the NAS.
 

IceStormNG

macrumors 6502a
Sep 23, 2020
517
676
Also noticed that with my Time machine disk (HFS+). First I though it has to flush the buffer, but the disk has no activity when waiting during unmount. Also: Time machine is much slower in Big Sur than it was under Catalina. On Catty it was usually 150MB/s transfer speed. On Big Sur it's 40MB/s at best (for large files which HDDs can transfer the best). Exact same disk.

My external SSDs, which are NTFS formatted, don't show this problem. USB sticks with exFAT are also slow to eject. I couldn't find anything in the system logs yet that could explain it.
 
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