External Hard Drive SSD broken and paralyzes my whole console

I have a Seagate SSD 2TB, bought a few years ago and has worked wonders up until recently. Last week, I experienced the error code 0x8027025a when trying to play any of my games. (The error code says that the game took too long to start). After much back and forth, a reinstall og the game worked.

However, this week the problem is back and worse than ever. I can no longer play any of my games on my external hard drive. I never get past the initial loading screen, before it kicks me back to the home screen. Sometimes I get the same error code, sometimes not. Sometimes I get the notification saying "external hard drive ready!", sometimes not. Sometimes I can scroll through my games & apps, sometimes it just loads forever.

Here is the even weirder part: I can't even play games saved internally on my Xbox while my SSD is connected. I get the same issue, with the game kicking me out before the game even gets past the initial loading screen. However, if I unplug my SSD, I can play the games saved internally on my Xbox.

Now, I have tried a bunch of different things:

I have tried turning my console on and off, power cycling it, unplugging the power cord, changing the USB my SSD is using (both while the console is on and off), reinstall games on my external hard drive (these downloads have frozen, and won't progress any more), and doing a soft factory reset on my console. I think my SSD suddenly has broken for some weird, unknown reason.

Does anyone have any solutions or similar experiences to this? Right now I'm contemplating buying a new SSD, but I fear my SSD is corrupted and if I transfer all my files over, my new SSD will be corrupted. Is this realistic?

Anyways, thanks for reading, and I hope somebody could help me out.

EDIT: The problem is solved, thanks to Obsessive Powers replies. I had to disconnect my SSD, connect it to my pc, format it to be used for my pc (I found a youtube tutorial on this: "how to reformat a xbox ssd to use with pc" or something similar. Unfortunately all my games and apps were deleted in this progress, but data was saved in the clouds so saved data is not gone. I then unplugged it from my pc, reconnected it to my Xbox, and I was asked if I wanted to use it for games and apps, and clicked yes. To test if it worked, I downloaded a game onto my external hard drive, and tested if it would run. It did, and my saved progress was still there!! All I have to do now is redownload all my games, and I am good to go.

:)