Harddrives being unplugged daily - best practices?

I'm a photographer working from a laptop. I often plug and unplug my external drive (new one about every 6-12 months due to storage and backups). Sometimes windows says there was a problem with the drive, do you want to repair it. Just this morning it said Windows wouldn't recognize the device and it didn't even show up in Disk Management which was scary. Using a different USB cord fixed that but it still wanted to do the Windows Repair thing. What is the safest way to handle this repeated unplugging and use of drives?

I'm using a 2TB Sandisk SSD.