Project will repeatedly unmount/mount my external hard drive

[EDIT] NOT A DAVINCI RESOLVE PROBLEM. MODERATORS PLEASE DELETE THIS THREAD.

I'm using Davinci Resolve 17.1.1 on Windows 10. I have a project with Blackmagic Raw footage located on a USB 3.0 external hard drive (Toshiba 4TB) formatted in ExFat.
Every time I open this specific project, my external hard drive will start unmounting and remounting in rapid fire, like 2 or 3 times. When I scrub the project it does the same thing. Rendering the project would cause "Media Missing" screens everywhere there's footage, which makes sense because the footage unlinks itself every time it happens. As long as Resolve is closed, this drive behaves reliably the way it should.
Right now I am downloading the latest version 17.4.3 of Resolve. I'm going to re-open the project and see if it fixes it.
When I have tried creating a blank project and the drive didn't react to that. If the update doesn't sort out the issue, I'm going to try copy/pasting my timeline's content into the new blank project and see what it does.
If anyone else encountered a similar issue or has any ideas on things to try to isolate / identify the root cause, thanks to let me know. DING! Download complete. I'll be back in 30 minutes

So I've downloaded the latest Davinci Resolve and it still does it.
I have opened that blank project and copied the contents of my original project's timeline in it and it's going crazy again unmounting / mounting every few seconds.
I have no choice now than to screenshot every compositions in this project until I hit the point where it starts doing this again. I'll report back if I find anything. In the meantime, please feel free to leave me any insights below...

Well, that was quick. Importing Media from the external hard drive instantly triggered the problem. I'm stuck, I can't work on my project anymore. Going to check out a different workstation and see if it fixes the problem. The workstation I'm on was working fine until Saturday morning. I'm seriously confused because I do not know anything that might have changed between Friday evening and Saturday morning. I don't remember Windows doing updates or anything.

Good news, I've managed to replicate the problem without Davinci Resolve, while simply trying to read data from that drive. It's been disconnecting and reconnecting exactly the same. So this is not a Resolve problem and I'm going further down the rabbit hole. In the meantime, can someone delete this post ?

Of course it's not a Resolve problem. Check the SMART values of the drive and replace its cable with something of quality, don't use hubs in between.

I'd actually recommend you spend the few dollars on stablebit scanner. It tells you such problems right away and you can spend your life time with more fun things.

If this were a Mac M1, I could tell you the workaround (got that issue with some drives).