Many people who are new to Macs are sometimes confused about external drives and how to properly remove them. Simply unplugging them from your Mac is a big no-no and could end up resulting in a trashed drive or data loss.

Depending on your setup, whenever you attach a flash drive or an external drive to your Mac, its icon will appear in three places: on your Desktop, in the Computer Window (Go > Computer from the Finder) and in the Finder Sidebar. To display external drives on the Desktop, click Finder > Preferences and under the General tab, choose the items you wish to show on your Desktop. Likewise, click the Sidebar tab to choose which drives are to appear in the Sidebar.

4 Ways To Eject a CD, DVD, External Drive or Flash Drive:

1. To eject a CD or DVD, hold down the eject key on your keyboard.
   
2. Drag the disk icon (not file or folder icons) to the Trash icon on the Dock. Don’t worry – your files and folders will not be deleted.
3. Select the icon and choose File > Eject from the menu.
4. Right-click or press with 2 fingers on your trackpad and choose Eject Diskname from the contextual menu.
5. Open the Disk Utility application (Go > Utilities then double-click Disk Utility), select the drive to eject and choose File > Eject from the menu.

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