External Hard Drive Issues on MacOS Sierra

Hello All,

Just some background, I got a WD 2TB External Drive about 4-5 years ago for my Mac to store movies and such, and I've never had issues with it before, but now when I plug it in I find that finder is extremely unresponsive and has a ton of trouble opening the device.

My mac knows that the HDD is there the second I plug it in, but when I click on it, finder stalls and opening even a single folder on the drive can take up to 5-10 minutes.

I attempted to do first aid on disk repair, but I got an error because Disk Repair was unable to unmount the device.

Additionally, if I yank out the hard drive, finder and any slowed applications go back to being responsive instantly. Also, for some reason my mac still thinks the drive is there, because it still appears in finder and I have to click "force eject" in order to remove the icon.

OS: macOS High Sierra version 10.13.4.

Computer: MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013)

External Hard Drive: WD My Passport for Mac 2TB Portable External Hard Drive Storage USB 3.0 (http://a.co/bwXUzYc)

I've looked at similar questions to mine on this website, but unfortunately not many of the answers were possible because of the slow responsiveness on my mac. Has anyone on here experienced a similar issue to mine?

Thank you for the assistance!