Finder freezes when accessing an external drive

I have been using WD 3TB green drives in docks for storage for years. For the last 6 months occasionally I will access one of the drives and the finder freezes up, I will then need to restart the computer. When I try to mount my drive I get a "The disk inserted was not readable by this computer". I do not want to loose the data so I will not initialize the drive. Disk Utility will not even recognize the drive nor will Disk Warrior. In order to save the data I need to use a recovery software. I use Ontrack EasyRecovery Home, it works great but is taxing on the computer and takes a lot of time. So does anybody know why this is happening? Is it a problem with my computer or the manufacturing of the drives?

Probably a coincidence, but this has only happened to the WD green drives since they changed the packaging from green to yellow.