If you need to share a drive between a Mac and Windows, then make sure to use Disk Utility to erase the whole physical drive as GUID partition and exFAT. If the external drive is only to be used with a Mac, then erase the drive as GUID partition and MacOS Extended (Journaled).
If you have an M1 Mac, then I've seen reports on these forums where some external drives don't mount properly (especially ones formatted with NTFS). Some of this may be due to the USB controller used by the external drive and part of it may be due to the NTFS volume. The details of the issue are not clear because I have not seen any in depth investigation into the issue.
It is best to have macOS manage the external drives. Installing third party software to manage an external drive typically causes problems.