The defect is probably in the WD My Passport Ultra controller. These all in one drive and controllers from WD, Seagate, etc. are notorious for "crapping out".
Often they have controllers that have the USB and SATA interfaces in one circuit board so if they die, both the drive and the circuit board, are useless.
Better to buy a seperate standard SATA drive and an external USB enclosure. If you shop carefully you get a USB 3.1 Gen 2 enclosure/case with file transfer rates of up to 10 Gbps - twice the speed of USB 3.0 (USB 3.1 Gen 1)
If either one fails it is very simple to replace. If the enclosure fails the drive can be hooked up to any SATA port and data recovered. Having said this I have never had any of these external enclosures fail over many, many years, and I'm including old IDE ones as well.
BUT IFIXIT is filled with people having these proprietary (trademark or branded) ones fail. Hey people, the component ones are easy to setup. Often no screws are even needed. My favourite one is waterproof and you just click the case open, plug in the drive, click it shut and away you go. Easy peasy!