How do I not accidentally eject external drives?

I have a Mac Mini with a few external drives connected that I use as a home server. Normally the Eject buttons next to the drive icon are really handy as they let me eject an external drive very easily (compared to Windows for instance).

However on a Mac server, this comes as a detriment. I have some pretty mission critical stuff on external drives and there's a lot of scripts etc. I have set up that are dependent on those drives being there. Being able to so easily accidentally eject those drives makes me rather uneasy.

So far I've just chosen to not show them in the Finder sidebar, that way at least they're a bit harder to eject. However that isn't very ideal because: (1) I need to go to my Mac in the sidebar to access the drives rather than have the drives accessible directly and (2) the eject buttons still show in open/save dialogue boxes for those drives.

Ideally, I'd like a way for them to behave the way internal drives do: no option to easily eject from the finder, but still possible to unmount through disk utility.

Solution 1:

Place a foot in the door.

• On each of your disks, create a text file, open it in TextEdit, add some line, and leave the file open unsaved.

I think this trick will prevent ejection.

Test this trick, try to eject the disk and come here tell us the result.

This trick can easily be automated.

Solution 2:

If your important external drive is mounted on the following mount point:

/Volumes/important_disk

Then you can protect it against an accidental removal by locking this mount point as opened. For this one very simple method consists in opening Terminal and doing this basic command:

$ cd /Volumes/important_disk

To get rid of this locking, you might type within the same Terminal window:

$ cd /

or you might as well just close this Terminal window ($ exit, or ⌃+D, or ⌘+W).