Anytime I have to eject my hard drive I have to force eject.

Have you tried running First Aid on the external HDD as well as your internal drive? First Aid - Verify and Repair HFS+, APFS Drives with Disk Utility. You should never eject your startup drive (internal.)

macuser338 wrote:

Thank you for your reply! I ran the first aid and it said "First aid process has failed. If possible back up the data on this volume. Click done to continue."

I'm not sure what this means and I'm slightly worried. All my photos are currently on my hard drive and I would be heart broken if they were to be lost. Any recommendations what I should do now?

Thanks!

You should have regular backups of your main system drive and also the external drive or you risk losing important items. The more important the data the more copies you should have of the data.

You can try checking the health of the external hard drive by running DriveDX. You may also need to install a special USB driver as well so the necessary communication is possible. Unfortunately not all external drives allow or support the necessary communication or the health reporting feature. Post the DriveDX report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper. I will review the report to give you an idea about the health of the drive.

That usually means the drive is failing or has failed. The drive needs to be replaced. I would take the advice of Disk Utility and backup your files, if you haven't already done so. I would do this ASAP.

That would imply that the hard drive may be failing. You should do what it says - purchase a new hard drive and copy all your files over to the new hard drive as soon as possible.