Ejecta

When you try to eject an external drive on macOS, you often get a frustrating error: "The disk wasn't ejected because one or more programs may be using it." But macOS never tells you which program. Your options are to guess, force eject (risking data corruption), or dig through Terminal commands.

Ejecta solves this. It sits in your menu bar and shows all your connected external drives with a simple status indicator. Green means safe to eject. Red means something is blocking it. Hover over a blocked drive to see exactly which processes are responsible, then quit them with one click.

The usual culprits are system processes you'd never think to check: Spotlight indexing, QuickLook after you previewed a file, or Finder itself. Ejecta identifies them all.

What you get:

• Menu bar app showing all external drives (USB, Thunderbolt, SD cards)
• Real-time status: green (safe) or red (blocked)
• List of blocking processes with one-click quit
• Safe ejection after clearing blockers
• Native macOS notifications on successful ejection

Requirements:

• macOS 14 Sonoma or later
• Full Disk Access permission (required to see which processes have files open)

Note: Ejecta is sold directly rather than through the Mac App Store because App Store sandboxing prevents apps from accessing process information. The app is signed and notarized by Apple.

One-time purchase. No subscription.