Safely Remove External Hard Drives From The CLI
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
You might have noticed that after
sudo umount /dev/sdX
a external hard drive is still making noise and appears to be in use by the OS. This is because rotating hard disks require a few extra commands before they can be safely unplugged, udisks is a CLI tool that can be used for this purpose.
2 Udisks
To unmount the external harddrive:
udisksctl unmount -b /dev/sdXn
followed by:
udisksctl power-off -b /dev/sdX
The commands result in a graceful power down of the spinning hard drive; after which it can be safely unplugged.
Note that the last command turns off all the power to the specific
port and if you use a usb hub that might cause other devices connected
to that hub to lose connection, check the udisksctl man page for
more information on this.