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I have a question similar to a previous one about ejecting before shutting down.

Is it necessary or recommended practice to eject external drives before putting a Mac to sleep, whether it be via an explicit sleep command (e.g., from the Apple menu or other equivalent means), if Energy Saver puts the Mac to sleep, or the closing of a lid on a laptop Mac?

Edit: To add a clarifying point, I do not plan to physically disconnect the drive before waking the Mac from sleep?

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marked as duplicate by Mark, Matthieu Riegler, bmike Mar 9 at 2:47

This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.

3 Answers 3

It's neither necessary nor recommended (at least from what I've read).

When you put the Mac to sleep, it will try and also put the external drive to sleep, thus parking its heads and turning off the drives. It won't eject it, however, so you can use it as soon as you wake your Mac again without having to mount it.

The benefit is that you don't have to worry about mounting it, as in most cases this would involve turning the drive off and on again, reconnecting the plug, or using diskutil from a Terminal—quite time consuming. Since I use my drive for Time Machine, I don't want to have to think about connecting it every time I wake my Mac.

The only downside I see is that you could accidentally plug the drive out. In that case, the Mac will wake up, and show you the error about a drive being disconnected without properly ejecting it. Since all data is written to the drive before going to sleep, this shouldn't cause any data loss though.

All in all, it's much more comfortable to just keep the drive mounted.

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Maybe it's not necessary, but I would recommend ejecting drives before going to sleep, at least on a MacBook. It has just too often happened to me that I had to leave in a rush and then I didn't find the time to open the lid, eject the drives and putting closing it again – I just grabbed the Machine, pulled all cables and left – and that can be a quite bad idea, especially when working with FireWire connections...

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I usually don't eject external drives before sleeping my machine. I went so far as closing my laptop, thus put it in sleep mode, wait a couple of seconds for it to enter sleep mode, then yank out the drive's USB cable. Later on, when the laptop wakes, it does not see the hard drive, but things will go on normally.

Update

Yes, before putting the machine to sleep, I make sure quit all applications which use the external drive. Here is a common scenario for me:

  1. At the office, close the laptop to put it in sleep mode
  2. After the laptop is in sleep mode, yank the USB cable to remove the hard drive
  3. At home, re-attach the hard drive
  4. Wake the machine up

Everything should work as normal now.

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