MacBook pro does not recognize my WD external hard drive anymore

I use TIme Machine on my WD external hard drive. Everything was working great up until about a month ago. My MacBook Pro does not recognize my external hard drive anymore...I have done nothing differently than usual. I did search in previous discussions and tried rebooting both the hard drive and the computer.
The USB port is fine as it does recognize another external hard drive and also pen drives....Please help! I haven't backed up in a month and need to figure out how to get this to work soon. Should I call WD?

Does the WD drive show in Disk Utility?
Many times, a USB port simply cannot provide the power a hard drive needs. It is not uncommon for any electric motor to draw more power as it ages. A drive that worked before can stop working when it gets older because age has made it tak more power than any USB port can supply. There are a couple of cheap things to try:
1) A "Y" USB cable---two plugs go to the computer and one to hte drive, giving a power boost.
1 Meter USB 2.0 A to 5 Pin Mini B Cable - Auxiliary USB "Y" Power Design for external hard drives.
2) a POWERED USB hub. That takes the power delivery burden off the USB port so it can deal with data.
WD bare drives are fine but their enclosures are not very Mac-friendly. One thing that has reported helping is to get rid of the proprietary formating that WD puts on their drives. If you don't have to share the drive with a Windows computer, use Disk Utility to erase and reformat the drive to Macintosh Extended Journaled.

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