Issues with external hard drives after upgrading to somoma

After upgrading to MacOS Sonoma, I'm experiencing problems with external hard drives. Sometimes Sonoma does not recognize any external hard drives. Disk Utility may not see any hard drives including the main internal hard drive of the iMac. External drives are not seen when the iMac is turned on. The drives may be recognized later. Sometimes Terminal will freeze and needs a Force Quit. I used rsync to back up my files to external hard drives. Now rsync tries to back up all of the files instead of the recently modified files which can take over a day. These problems did not exist before upgrading to Sonoma. The only change was upgrading to Sonoma from MacOS 12.x. I also noticed that bootup time is longer on Sonoma. Could Sonoma be using more power such that the external drives may not be getting enough power thus being offline even on a desktop that is plugged into the wall socket?

I need external hard drives as ExFAT formatted drives to allow the drives to be read and written to by Windows but mainly Linux. I routinely use USB ExFAT formatted thumb drives to transfer files to other computers and store copy machines that take USB drives.