External hard drives for newest MacBook Pro

Thanks for your replies.  I use Lightroom Classic and Photoshop and the performance on my old 2015 MacBook Pro w 2 USB 3.0 ports has been painfully slow.  Also that computer won't accommodate some of the newer processing software and my internal hard drive is filling up.  For years I have used 2 external hard drives for my library - one as my "primary" working drive and the other as backup.  But they fill up and age.  Lastyear I bought a 10 TB WD My Book with the plan of copying all the old images to it.  Though I formatted it for use with Mac it has not been working optimally - the "on" light never comes on, unless I dismount it immediately after completing  download (using it as backup) it won't dismount, and it occassionally makes noises that WDs website says indicate inadequate power (has its own plug in the wall power cord.) This year I've been using a 2TB Sandisk SSD drive as my working drive for current photos.  I want to be able to access my old images for processing. I want faster performance, dependable HDs/ reliable backups, easy access to all my photos. Library is now about 7-8 TB.

Is there a reason that you need new external hard drives? Is it that you don’t have any yet, but you need more storage? Or do you already have some, and you believe you have to replace them? Are you upgrading from a much older Mac with different ports, and if so, which year and model?

I now have an M1 Pro MacBook Pro, and I simply continued using all of the external USB storage I had before.

Also, do you want new external storage for…

Bulk photo storage for Photoshop and Lightroom Classic?

Improved editing performance in Photoshop and Lightroom Classic?

Backups?

The reasons for those questions is that the right recommendation depends on your goals. For some goals, big cheap hard drives are recommended; for other goals fast solid state drives are recommended. And if it’s just a matter of the ports being different,  many older drives can continue to be used by buying inexpensive adapters.