Is there a menu bar tool which will let me eject external drives easily?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

Try Semulov - it is designed to eject volumes from the menu bar. The author has even made the source available on GitHub.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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.