I am running macOS Monterey 12.6 (context)

I have a 500gb Sandisk SSD from 2019. I filled it to 75% with photos from my phone and my cameras over the years. I used lightroom to edit said photos.

Recently, I was moving and renaming some folders and such on the drive directly. I also added new photos.

Then, all of a sudden, the stuff in the drive was slow to load. I thought this was a storage issue so I cleared photos to return back to ~75%. Also, lightroom was no longer able to find the photos. Ops, Lightroom wants you to move and rename folders in their software. Ok, I reimported everything into lightroom and I will rename and move some stuff there.

However, an issue with the drive developed. Long load times for folders to load occurred, sometimes there would be no loading and the graphical paths were blank; further, I was stopped for ejecting the drive because “an application is using the drive” and quitting all software would not solve the issue. Other times, the drive would just stop being accessible mid use. Even more, the drive was also not being detected, it would take a couple reboots, disconnects, and reconnects to get the disk detected.

I put off storing the data elsewhere because I thought I knew how to get the drive recognized: reboot the computer with the drive plugged in and I am good. It worked once but today, it ceased to be recognized. I have tried each of my 4 USB-C drives to no avail.

System report says there is a sandisk SSD plugged in,

and diskutil also finds it

What is going on? What can I do? :(((((((
Thank you ahead of time.