External hard drives keep freezing the Mac with recent updates?

Starting several months back with Monterey, my external hard drives (used for Time Machine backups) have one by one started freezing up any Mac they connect to. They refuse to mount, and the computer mostly freezes, refusing to open drop down menus or anything until the moment the hard drive in question is disconnected; then everything snaps back to normal. Disk Utility shows a blank window as well until I disconnect the drives in question, so there's no question of performing any operations on them. I just had another drive start acting this way today, and I'm running out of backup disks that still work. I've read elsewhere that this was a bug introduced early this year, but it's not going away...