External hard drive sometimes not appearing in Finder

I bought an external hard drive in a Smart Drive 2.5" HDD enclosure for use with my MacBook. Sometimes it works perfectly when I plug it into my USB, but sometimes it doesn't show in finder. If I wait for a long time it will usually show up eventually. When I verified the drive using Disk Utility (when the disk wasn't showing up in Finder) Disk Utility reported back: "error Could not unmount disk." Then the disk showed up in finder.
What can I do to make this drive more reliable?

Rather than just Verify this external drive, have you tried to 'repair' it?
And, as previously asked, the format of the drive may have something
to do with performance; and there also may be some corruption in it.
If so, and you have removed all important data, you could use Disk Utility
to reformat the external drive to HFS+ after repairing it; then repair again.
And, if your USB cable is not getting an adequate connection, the external
hard disk drive may also have issues. Whether or not an external drive has
its own power supply, or relies on the computer's USB (or FW) bus power
may also have something to do with how the unit responds. Both of my
external hard disk drive units do not rely on computer power; that's best.
Good luck & happy computing!

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