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I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and connecting USB Flash Drives and External USB Hard Drives regular basis, I'm able to Eject my USB Flash Drive but I can't Eject or Safely Remove the External USB Hard Disks, It's seems Ubuntu provide only Unmount feature for External USB Hard Disks. external hard drives are spinning devices so Unmount won't sufficient to physically remove it.

Ubuntu provide Eject feature for USB Flash Drives

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But Ubuntu does not provide Eject or Safely Remove feature for External USB Hard Drive

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Is it a Bug in Ubuntu 14.04 or i'm missing something?

dimi
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  • Actually, the Unmount/Eject "IT WILL BREAK" is a kind of myth. – Star OS Nov 01 '15 at 17:15
  • @Star OS mounting won't stop spinning the drive – dimi Nov 01 '15 at 17:20
  • Just turn power off after unmounting. – lapisdecor Nov 01 '15 at 17:22
  • Possible Duplicate? http://askubuntu.com/questions/5845/what-is-the-difference-between-unmount-eject-safely-remove-drive-and-the – Mitch Nov 01 '15 at 18:02
  • Unmount won't power down the driver,after unmount it still has the power light on and still spinning,as far as i know physically removing the spinning device is not healthy for drive.in windows safely remove completely power down drive.i'm think unmount is not sufficient for job well done.i like to sajes this to ubuntu to fix it in future versions – dimi Nov 01 '15 at 18:56
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    Actually, it's probably just the light showing that it still has power. Unless you're actively seeking or writing to the drive the heads will be at "rest state" and nothing should be spinning at all unless you have a faulty controller. HDDs are fairly noisy while spinning. Can you hear it spinning? If not, it is almost certainly not spinning. – KGIII Nov 01 '15 at 19:03
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    @dilee: It's perfectly fine and safe to unmount and power off a spinning drive. The only time you need to be worried is when you're writing data to it (impossible when unmounting). – Kaz Wolfe Nov 01 '15 at 20:26

4 Answers4

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You just have to Unmount the disk.

lapisdecor
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    Unmount won't power down the driver,it still has the power light on and still spinning,as far as i know removing the spinning device is not healthy for drive.in windows safely remove completely power down drive.i'm telling unmount is not doing the job welldone – dimi Nov 01 '15 at 18:28
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    If drive is unmounted it is save to unplug it – lapisdecor Nov 01 '15 at 23:40
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    it is only unsafe to remove your device while it is interacting with your system. by un-mounting it, you stop this interaction. So after that you can safely remove it. – Mostafa Ahangarha Mar 05 '16 at 16:02
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From a different answered question [ Is there any way to turn off a USB HDD manually? ] I use:

sync
eject /dev/sdX
sudo hdparm -y /dev/sdX

where 'X' is the drive you want to powerdown.

This worked for my USB attached Seagate backup drive. Before issuing the command I could hear and feel the drive spinning. After the hdparm command, the drives 'power' light was lit but the drive had stopped spinning.

I use the the 'sync' command to synchronize any cached writes before the spin-down and the 'eject' to force an unmount of any of the /dev/sdX partitions. Don't know if it's needed, but it makes me feel better.

dave58
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Use umount with Force option. if your device is /dev/sdb1, use:

sudo umount -f /dev/sdb1
Mostafa Ahangarha
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This probably means you still have something accessing the disk. You have to hunt for it (in my case, it was an LVM volume group that was still active, which I had to de-activate using vgchange -a n $volgrp_name but this is a bit of a special case I suppose).

Once you are certain that you no longer have anything accessing the disk, using the Umount option in the GUI is safe and/or the UI option will change by itself to "Safely Remove".

If the drive is still spinning you can use hdparm to tell is to go to sleep, as in:

hdparm -Y /dev/sdX

(replace sdX with your drive letter). According to the man page, the -Y option does this:

Force an IDE drive to immediately enter the lowest power consumption sleep mode, causing it to shut down completely [...]

sxc731
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