Sometimes Mac doesn’t recognize the external hard drive

This question has been asked on here many times before but I cannot find a solution that actually works.

Macbook Pro: 2015
MacOS 10.14.6
External Hard Drive: Seagate 4TB (2 TB partitions) (No external power supply)

Sometimes I can just unplug the external hard drive and plug it back in and it is magically recognized again.

But sometimes the magic does not work and I have to reboot. This is incredibly annoying as I have 12 desktops running with a variety of programs and it takes a lot of work to set this up again after a reboot.

Having to constantly reboot my mac book pro every time that macos fails to mount the external hard drive is very annoying.

When I run "sudo diskutil list", I should see 2 TB partitions on my external hard drive. I do not.

>diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk1         1.0 TB     disk0s2

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +1.0 TB     disk1
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume d                       600.4 GB   disk1s1
   2:                APFS Volume Preboot                 43.9 MB    disk1s2
   3:                APFS Volume Recovery                510.4 MB   disk1s3
   4:                APFS Volume VM                      4.3 GB     disk1s4

I expect to see something like this:

>diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage Macintosh HD            999.7 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1 (internal, virtual):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS d                      +999.3 GB   disk1
                                 Logical Volume on disk0s2
                                 8A8B74D4-BB0A-4593-8F8C-068383425497
                                 Unencrypted
/dev/disk3 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *2.0 TB     disk3
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk3s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Backup                  2.0 TB     disk3s2
/dev/disk4 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *4.0 TB     disk4
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk4s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS seagate_4tb             2.0 TB     disk4s2
   3:                  Apple_HFS Untitled                2.0 TB     disk4s3

As suggested in Sometimes Mac doesn't recognise my external hard drive, I tried using the console app.

When I connect the external drive to the USB slot I see a lot of messages in the console. I initially thought this meant that the os was detecting the device because I saw the IOUSBHostDevice in the message. However, on closer inspection, this seems to be Bluetooth.

If there is a way to determine from console what I should do to persuade the os to actually recognize the device and mount the volumes, I am not seeing it.

I did find one suggestion for restarting the USB subsystem which involves:
1: Installing Prober.app
2: Running a command like this:

USB\ Prober.app/Contents/Resources/reenumerate -v 0x00000bda,0x00008153

I have no idea what that hex string represents but this feels a little dangerous and unnecessarily complicated to fix a problem that occurs so frequently.

Surely there is a safer and simpler way to communicate to macos that it needs to detect the external hard drive?