Mac Mini M1 problems with extral hard drives not recognized after sleep or reboot

I've had my Mac Mini M1 for going on one year now and from day one I've had issues with my 2 external hard drives (purchased new after buying the Mac Mini) no longer found after my Mac Mini M1 goes to sleep. I have since set the energy saver feature to not allow hard disks to sleep. That worked well with the WD My Book which has an external power supply, but not always with my small WD Passport which relies on power from the computer. Since upgrading to Ventura, the WD MyBook is no longer recognized if I reboot, unless I eject it before shutting down. In all cases I have to run WD's diagnostic utilizes to get the drives working again. Pain in the butt! I use my computers for photo editing and storage.

I have asked Western Digital about this problem and they had no answer. I'l ask them again. Both drivers are formatted Ex fat so that I can copy files from my old Windows 10 PC

I've heard of others having similar issues when using external hubs, but this happens to me even when the drives are connected directly to the Mac Mini M1.

BTW, this problem has not happened with these drives when using my Mac Book Pro ( 2-3 years old with Intel Chips). Nor with the Windows PC.

I'm setting up a Synolgy NAS to store my extensive Photo and Music libraries out of frustration with this problem. I've already noticed that my mapped shared folder has to be logged into again when I have to reboot the Mac Mini M1 whereas that is not the case with the Windows 10 PC. I thought when I bought this Mac Mini that I would be leaving all these strange bugs that Windows has, in the past. I guess I was wrong!