external hard drive not working

I use a Toshiba 4TB hard drive to house my Photos Library and Music Library. It suddenly stopped working last week. When attached, it shows "loading" for about 10 mins, then the MacBook Pro (Retina late 2013, Big Sur 11.6.8) ejects the drive with this message: "Eject 'TOSHIBA 4T' before disconnecting or turning it off".

Just before the drive ejects, the Macbook stop responding - I can't move the mouse or select anything else. As soon as the drive ejects, then the Macbook returns to normal functioning.

I used Disk Utility to look at the disk and it says that the disk is fine. I have tried changing the cable. I don't have another Macbook to connect the drive to, so I can't perform that troubleshooting step.

I have used Terminal to try to access the drive, but again, it just hangs.

I have tried resetting the SMC and immediately after, the drive loaded and I could open it and see the file list, but when I tried to look at any particular folder, it hung with "loading" for several minutes until it finally just ejected with the previous message.

The drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and currently has 1.82 TB Free space.

I have attached other external drives with the following results:

1. 1. 5 TB drive used for Time Machine - no problem
   2. 2 TB drive. At first, it also ejected after a few minutes, but after I reset the SMC, it now functions just fine.
   3. 1 TB SSD. Works just fine.

If there is something wrong with the drive, why doesn't Disk Utility pick it up?

I really want to try to rescue my Photos and Music.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.