@EAP I think it’s great that you’re trying all of these things. At one point I had noticed increasing the “Turn off hard disk after” power option could help with cases where an external drive had been idle for a while and then it would disconnect the next time I tried to use it.
Turn off hard disk after => HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\0012ee47-9041-4b5d-9b77-535fba8b1442\6738e2c4-e8a5-4a42-b16a-e040e769756e
Also, the “Better Performance” USB Disk policy (that I describe here) helped stabilize connections a bit when I was originally having the 1 TB expansion card disconnect trouble. It also resulted in the “Disk 1 has been surprise removed” event log entries when the drive did disconnect. This message doesn’t seem to appear when Quick Removal is enabled. I guess that’s because you’re allowed to remove the drive whenever you want with the option on.
I will note that @Michael_Wu has noticed these problems on both Windows and Linux. And just like me, he’s even replaced his 11th gen mainboard.
That’s not to say that there aren’t ways to mitigate the problem like the powered hub. And finding some advanced power option to stabilize things would be awesome!