JETTISON REVIEW

How often have you been at your home or office working on your Mac when you remembered that you needed to take your Mac with you to an urgent meeting or event?

The normal sequence of events is to manually unmount all of the external drives that are connected to your Mac, and eject any SD card that is attached.

 But most times, every drive doesn't unmount successfully; this can happen if at least one of the externals is in use; maybe you have an unsaved document or one of your programs is still running. 

If you close the lid of your Mac and disconnect the cables from your Mac, without unmounting all your drives, you can end up with a corrupt drive.

To ensure your Mac's external drives are ejected properly, you need Jettison. It works with portable Macs as well as desktop Macs. Jettison eliminates the need to manually eject connected drives or SD cards when putting your Mac to sleep.

JETTISON REVIEW

Pros

·        Works automatically to eject external drives.

·        It can be triggered by simply closing your Mac’s lid.

·        It can also be triggered by selecting Sleep.

·        Prevents sleep until all external devices are ejected.

·        Remounts externals when your Mac wakes up.

Con

·        Can’t specify which externals to automatically eject when going to sleep.

Using Jettison

Jettison installs as a menu bar item that provides easy access to ejection options, the ability to easily mount drives, and options for sleep. In fact, the eject and mount options are so easy to get at from the menu bar you may never delve into Disk Utility for these capabilities again.

The following options are available from Jettison Menu Bar:

·        Eject External Disks Now

·        Eject and Sleep Now

·        Sleep Now

·        Remount Ejected Disks Now

·        Eject

·        License

·        Mount

·        Preferences

·        About Jettison

·        Quit Jettison

The first three items are the Jettison services you will likely use the most. Eject External Disks Now ejects all attached external drives. Jettison will display a status message indicating that the ejection is proceeding. Once all the externals are ejected, a notification sound will be played (you can choose the sound in the Jettison preferences), and an alert will be displayed.

Eject and Sleep Now provides the same ejection services as Eject External Disks Now, plus, once the ejection completes with no issues, your Mac will be put to sleep. This same eject and sleep process is performed if Jettison is active and you close the lid of a portable Mac or choose sleep from the Apple menu.

Sleep Now forces your Mac to sleep without first ejecting any external drives. This mimics the way that Macs were originally put to sleep, and can be useful when you just need to control access to your Mac within a short absence.

Remount Ejected Disks Now remounts any drives that were previously ejected by Jettison immediately. This is much quicker than manually opening Disk Utility to remount the drives.

The Eject and Mount commands in Jettison allow you to select a single device to eject or mount. You can even use the mount command to mount normally hidden volumes, such as the Recovery HD partition.

Review

Jettison is well designed, easy to use, and addresses a real-world need to be able to safely and quickly disconnect your portable Mac from your externals so you can take it with you wherever you need to go.

Jettison can’t prevent you from physically disconnecting a drive prematurely, but it can automate the process of going to sleep, ejecting all external drives, and letting you know that the drives have all been ejected properly and that sleep has been started.

Jettison also works well for any desktop Mac connected to external drives. The many menu items within Jettison can easily take care of all drive eject and mounting needs.

Jettison is available from the Mac App Store for $4.99. A demo is available from St. Clair Software’s website.