Safely Closing Out USB Ports

I am using a new Macbook Air and am using the usb ports to run an external cd drive, as well as an external audio interface. My question is, how do I safely eject these devices, as they do not show up on my desktop?

External drives/USB thumbdrives etc need to be ejected to prevent possible data corruption by just pulling them out. Your audio and cd drive(unless you're playing a cd or importing into iTunes) aren't transferring data, so you can just unplug them.

My question is, how do I safely eject these devices, as they do not show up on my desktop?

Click to expand...

Open Finder, select Preferences, select the General Tab, place a check mark in the boxes that show external devices. And then follow directions as given by member MightyGem. If those boxes are already checked and your devices are still not showing up, then you have other problems.

Closing USB port connections

Tim Weller said:

I am using a new Macbook Air and am using the usb ports to run an external cd drive, as well as an external audio interface. My question is, how do I safely eject these devices, as they do not show up on my desktop?

Click to expand...

Go to a Finder window, select preferences and Under general set up as shown. This way your peripherals will show up on your Desktop and you can Eject them by Right Clicking each one and selecting eject.

But again, if there is no disc in the external optical drive, it won't show up, and doesn't need to be unmounted. And non storage devices also don't need to be unmounted.