Why Don't My Mac Studio External Drives Work After The New Update?

[TurboCoder2022]

I have tried the basic settings to confirm and they are not confirmed - and I am getting frustrated. I have the following 3 external hard drives:

Crucial X6 2TB
Seagate Expansion Drive 3TB
Seagate Expansion Drive 4TB

All of a sudden around noon today - all of my external drives just stopped working. I updated to MacOS Ventura version 13.3.1 last night around 7:00 p.m.

Then, around noon, all of a sudden I got an error that said "please be sure to eject disk before disconnecting," the drives disconnected, and now they don't work in any USB-C/USB port. They just simply don't get found. I am using NTFS for Mac because some of these are Windows drives. Anyway...

But, today, I never did any updates. All the drives worked just fine since the update. It was only since noon that they stopped working.

What gives?

EDIT: please note that the error mentioned above happened automatically. I did absolutely nothing to the drives that would have resulted in that error.

 

[edubfromktown]

No issues with APFS external drives (and RAID 0 pairs too) so far. I suspect it is NTFS specific.

 

[TurboCoder2022]

Okay...I think I have resolved it using NTFS for Mac. Just had to get the right mounting/repairing settings back for some reason. Whew. Thank you everyone, for your replies thus far!