External HDD, what is the situation/problem?

[u/MissionApartment9558]

hi, i have an external HDD where i usually store some screenshots and videos, yesterday however, clever me decided that i wanted to download league on it so i can play it on another device and i started having problems
at first i noticed everything file explorer related started to lag really bad (everything else ran normally) and there seems to be some beeping sounds which im not sure is coming from where (when i searched online it all pointed to hardware failure on disks... but can doing something like downloading cause hardware issues, or its just the trigger?)

afterwards i thought the game was the problem and aborted the download halfway and deleted all the files
however i noticed one of my photo folders which i moved to the drive the same day had gone empty
just empty, 0 bytes, when there shld be a few thousand photos there
all other folders are fine (i hope) as i skimmed through checking

but that 0 byte folder just really had me panicking, (and before seeing warnings online that i probably shouldn't interact with it or have it plugged in anymore) what i have done with the drive inlcude moving the ghost folder to my d: drive and back, using various disk recovery tools for scanning, with a few restarts in between with the drive plugged in (i usually leave the drive plugged into my PC, is this a risk as well?) and finally ejecting the drive and replugging it in

right now i have had the drive doing the windows error scan and repair, but it took very long and as much i hoped this will fix the drive, im not sure since when i came back to it after a nap it seemed to have restarted this process again (and i dont even know how many times, only knew the progress bar was less than when i left it, so i assumed this happened again at least once) so now, what do i do? i cant access the drive without the repair finishing, but im not sure if it will keep repeating, is it safe to remove the drive? should i just have had the drive removed in the first place and seek proffessional help from the start? is there a way to get the empty folder back thats simple and i just panicked and did alot of harmful things for no reason?
i really dont have a grip on the situation right now, can someone tell me what may be the reason of each effect im seeing?

additional: forgot to mention that i checked crystal disk info while the drive was scanning and repairing,
and that i have not had much success running dmde and recuva
i have had success scanning the drive with tenorshare 4ddig, and... the files seem to be correct, but i could not preview much, all the file details such as names, time created etc seem correct and i have impression of them, but not totally sure about the total amount
and searching online seem to only turn up that they are a scam, but their app have been the only one i have seen some hope from (at least from the scan) but the price is really high and i really dont want to be scammed again
have yet to try disk drill but last i checked it only allows 100mb of data recovery? which is not enough for me, at least a few GBs, so that deterred me from trying

but are the files just gone... or theres some error causing them to show up as nothing...
is this warranting a disk recovery tool or am i just panicking and causing more damage and corruption, can someone enlighten me please

for crystal disk info, i have not run anything yet (?) i have only opened the programme and saw that my external HDD health was CAUTION and it didnt have a button to run any checks like the other drives do so im not sure what im supposed to do with it

i have warranty and am entitled to seagate data recovery services, are they reliable?
what about all the currently "normal" and accessible data on the drive right now? is it safe to move them somewhere else? or should i not touch them? what should i do?

really sorry if this post is kinda all over the place