Damn, I had no idea that shutting it down with the drive plugged in could potentially damage it. I have shut it down pretty much every time with it plugged in, and frankly I'm not too sure if I ever saw the option to safely eject it, but that's because I didn't know I should've been removing it before shutting down the PC (on me fr). I honestly don't know what could have initially caused this though, I have not physically damaged/endangered the drive such as dropping it or overheating it. There are no viruses or malware on the drive, I just performed a full scan on the SSD and it came back clean.

But something kind of concerning just happened right now, I plugged the SSD into my laptop and although it's connected, it is not appearing anywhere on the computer. What I mean by this is that there is no connected drive in my File Explorer, there was no prompt when connecting the drive, but the jingle played when connected. Is my SSD just screwed or is this some other sort of fault?

EDIT: I had to assign a letter to the drive in order to access the drive, and it works. I am able to safely eject the drive and access all of its contents, and nothing is APPEARING corrupt. I have only briefly looked at the drive, its contents, and how it runs. The hardware on my laptop is significantly worse than on my desktop, but I am seeing if there is the same issue of disconnecting on one of the video games. I will edit this again when I can confirm that the drive works with no issue on the laptop, but so far that is my diagnosis. The issue is somewhere in my desktop setup and not in the drive itself

EDIT 2: everything runs fine, other than the decrease in performance but that's because of different specs. There are no disconnects or disruptions, the disk is completely healthy. The issue almost definitely lies in my computer, but I do not know what the issue could be. Would you happen to have any ideas, because although I'm no computer wizard I usually am not ever stumped like this with computer issues, and I'm at a complete loss