5 Ways to Eject a Disk on a Mac Mar 9, 2021, 8:00 am EDT | 2 min read Before you unplug a removable drive on a Mac, you should always eject it. Here are five ways to do it with ease—and why you need to eject to begin with. Why Do You Need to Eject? Ejecting a disk on a Mac is a necessary step to prevent the loss of data. Here’s why: To speed up the perceived operation of writing data to an external drive, macOS sometimes writes data to a temporary location in memory instead of writing it to the disk. If you unplug a drive before that data has been written, it could be lost.