From my experience, when a disk is behaving in the manner you are suggesting, it has a major internal issue. Sometimes on external hard drives this can be caused by the adapter board they will use between the SATA drive and the USB connector. In that case removing the drive from its enclosure and hooking it up directly via SATA can help. Unfortunately, Western Digital has been following a different approach for this conversion recently that negates this method. Instead of using a standard SATA drive in their enclosures, they take a 2.5” hard drive and put a custom PCB on it that only has the USB connector visible from the outside of the device. This means taking this drive out of the plastic enclosure will unfortunately not help here.
In this case, your best bet is probably to start looking for a data recovery specialist and let them take care of it.