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edubfromktown

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 14, 2010
845
712
East Coast, USA
I recently purchased an M3 Pro 14" MBP 18GB/1TB and along with it, picked up a SanDisk Ultra Go USB Type-C (with a swivel and USB-A on the other side). I formatted the SanDisk APFS with Disk Utility and started shuttling files around. Straight away, whenever I ejected the flash drive Sonoma 14.5 would take a number of minutes, popping up timeout messages and the force eject option multiple times before the drive would finally unmount an disappear from my desktop.

I can't recall having problems with other flash drives in the past with older versions of MacOS and OS X. Not sure if this is a manufacturer-specific flash drive issue or OS related. The solution I found that appears to work is to format the top level "External USB device" and choose GUID partition map (in addition to APFS):

Backup your USB device data elsewhere before proceeding!

Open Disk Utility
Click View on the menu bar
Select: Show All Devices
Insert your USB drive in your Mac
Click on the top level "External" USB device that appeared after plugging in the USB flash drive
(make sure you do not select a different device)

Select Erase from the bar at the top

Choose: Format: APFS Schema and select GUID partition map

After performing the above, you should be able to eject the external device without waiting for an eternity or two 😁
 
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