Auto-eject external drives when Macbook goes to sleep

Sep 15, 2009
#macos

Edit Aug. 28, 2010 SleepWatcher has been changed since I wrote this post and now differs from the information found in the link below. This approach does still work, though, as does the modified script.

Since switching over from PC to Mac, I’ve always been annoyed that I manually have to eject external disks before putting the computer to sleep.

Luckily, I found a workaround. The link below has a link to a nice program called SleepWatcher and provides you with a nice collection of wakeup and sleep scripts:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080329201951648

The scripts will make sure that your external disk is automatically ejected when your computer goes to sleep. However, while the original script will eject USB drives, mounted .dmg drives etc. as well, I have edited the sleep script to only eject a particular external drive.

#!/bin/sh
osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to eject (disks where name = "type in the name of your disk here")'

Voilá – your external drive will now eject when your computer goes to sleep. No more annoying warning messages about first ejecting the external drive.