Lagging timeline, material disappears off hard drives, playback stutters, errors with playback

I'm not sure what is happening. 

Sandisk Gdrive 5TB G-DRIVE ArmorATD - Rugged

Mac M1 Max

64gb ram
Ventura 13.4.1
Premiere 23.5.0

I've tried multiple ports, multiple USBC cables

Premiere launches. I start editing, then after 5 minutes, playback is slow. It's choppy. Eventually, I go to look at my finder window with the external drive, zero items there. This happens on multiple drives. I've tried changing the read permissions to read/write. 

Not sure what else to do, please help. Thank you!