I have had western digital 14TB, 20TB and 22TB and all of them make my Mac so slow that I have to unplug the WD when I am not using it. Is there a cure for this?

Try booting into Safe Mode to see the WD drives work.

Check the health of the WD drives by running DriveDx (free trial period) and posting the complete text report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper on the forum editing toolbar. You will need to install a special USB driver in order to access the health information of the external drives.

What is the exact model of your Mac? You can get this information by clicking the Apple menu and selecting "About This Mac".

If you run the third party app EtreCheck and post the complete report here, then we can examine it for possible clues.

Try running Disk Utility First Aid on both the internal drive and the external drive(s)....run First Aid on the hidden Container. Within Disk Utility you may need to click "View" and select "Show All Devices" before the hidden Container appears on the left pane of Disk Utility. You may also want to run First Aid on the physical drive as well.....this will be the item with the name/make & model of the drive. Even if First Aid says everything is "Ok", click "Show Details" and scroll back through the report to see if any unfixed errors are listed. If there are errors, then run First Aid again until the errors are gone. If the errors are not gone after several scans, then First Aid is unable to repair them. If this happens, then let us know which drive has the issue and the file system on it.

When you erased the external drives, did you just erase the existing volume, or did you erase the whole physical drive? Sometimes an external drive may have some odd partition layouts & hidden data on them which can cause issues with macOS, so it it best to erase the whole physical drive in order to create a fresh partition table along with file system.

Are you using any adapters to connect the WD drives?

Are these plain data drives with a single partition, or a Time Machine backup drive, or a backup drive using third party apps?

What file system are you using on those WD drives?

Are you letting macOS manage the drives or did you install the WD proprietary software to mange the drives?

How are the drives connected to the computer?

Try disconnecting all other external devices in case one of them is causing a problem. Connect the WD drive directly to the computer.

Try connecting the WD drive to another USB port especially on the other side if using a laptop.

Try using another USB cable. If using an USB adapter, maybe try a different one.

Have you tried rebooting the computer?

Are you running any anti-virus software, cleaning/optimizer apps, or third party security software? If so, uninstall them by following the developers' instructions since these types of apps are not needed on a Mac and usually causes more problems than they solve because they interfere with the normal operation of macOS.

Are you letting macOS manage the drives or did you install the WD proprietary software to mange the drives?

What HWTech was referring to is that WD drives often come with software to manage the drives. They can interfere with the system's management of the drives and should not be used.

I hope you have a good backup of all the data you have stored on the WD external drive. The more important the data, then the more backup copies you should have of that data.

People should always have frequent and regular backups of their computer and all external media (including the cloud) which contains important & unique data.

I would suggest finding a good local Apple tech to investigate the issue for you. You can see if the Apple Store can assist you with your laptop & WD issues. However, an Apple Authorized Service Provider is more likely to have a tech who would look more closely at everything I have mentioned, than a tech at an Apple Store, but you can certainly have an Apple Store look at your laptop & drive to see if they can assist you. As you see from our questions & suggestions, there are a lot of things which could possibly cause the problems you mentioned.

Personally I have never cared for WD products. When WD has a good product....it is great, but WD products seem to vary in quality all the time, plus WD has been caught misleading people with their product details. You just never know what you may get when using a WD product.

Maybe the drive is going bad with I/O errors?