How to safely eject USB drive before unplugging it?

[ccman32]

I know that there are already a few threads about this, but I couldn't find a clear answer in any of them.

I noticed that after exporting a pool which is located on a USB drive (WD Elements Portable), the drive just keeps spinning and the status LED stays on. Sometimes when I wait for a while, the drive would eventually spin down and turn off completely, but I couldn't figure out when this happens and why it takes so long.

In another thread I found the suggestion to run camcontrol eject /dev/da0, but even after running it, the drive is still spinning and doesn't power off.

I also tried usbconfig -d ugen0.2 power_off and while that does seem to work most of the time, it sometimes throws this error:

usbconfig: could not set power OFF: Device not configured

Once this error occurs, I noticed that when unplugging the drive and plugging it back in, it would randomly fallback to USB 2.0 speeds for whatever reason and not get detected as a USB 3.0 device anymore until I reboot the entire system.

Is there any reliable way to completely eject and power off the drive before unplugging it, just like I can do in Windows or other OSes?

 

[danb35]

Once you export the pool, it's safe to unplug the disk. I'm not aware of a reliable way to power it off, though.