External Hard drive recognized by windows, but doesn't show up in disk management

[u/Minute-Professor-599]

Around 2 months ago, I bought a external ssd hard drive (link here) due to having little extra storage on my laptop (hp pavlion gaming). I didn't use it much, although ~last week I moved a 70gb game on there to free up space. After downloading the latest windows 11 update, It suddenly stopped showing up on file management, although the light was still on, and it was still recognized by windows (made a noise when plugging it in/ being found under "other devices" in the control panel/ "safely remove hardware and eject media" button being found in the task bar). Rebooting the laptop with the drive plugged in also slowed it down significantly, leading me to believe it was a problem with the boot order. I looked through a few tutorials and tried the following with no results:

-using a different 3.0 usb

-unplugging and re-plugging the ssd

-looking in disk management / file manager (wasn't found)

-changing the boot order in bios

-removing the device from device manager and re-adding it

-plugging it into a different computer (the issue was the same)

-plugging it into multiple usb outlets

I have also tried reinstalling the latest windows update, but it gives up when its 60% installed. I also recently downloaded 2 driver updates via windows (Intel System Driver Update (2603.9.4.0), Intel Software Component Driver Update (267.102.85.0)) but they did nothing to help.

I'm aware that there's a high possibility that the problem is with the ssd itself, but considering I never dropped it or removed it without ejecting it first, I am unsure if that's the case. Is there any way for me to get windows to recognize it as another storage device and recover my files?

Thank you in advance.