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Could be a power issue. 2.5" hard drives do require some power. Some external drives have two USB one for data and other for extra power.
Maybe one of your laptops isn't supplying enough power or the port is dirty causing resistance and voltage drop. Or it could be something else entirely.
any chance the usb connector is a bit dodgy? Does it happen the same on all USB ports?
Play video in background, watch output of dmesg --followor journalctl --follow, look for anything related when it break
maybe it is hdd sleep issue? it dumps file into ram, hdd idles, sleeps, laptop disconnects (due to some arcane parameter), it queries it, then it takes time to spin? does same thing happens if you actively do other stuff on hdd (opening/closing file every 2 min for example)?
I'm also betting on this. Trying to find energy-save settings for discs and also for USB might bring something.
pretty easily to test without getting bogged down in the weeds if you’re comfortable in terminal:
cd <drive path>
while true; do
date > test_file.txt
sleep 10
done
this will loop infinitely and write the the disk every 10s until you cancel, so should keep the disk awake… of course, if that works you can spend time figuring out how to keep the disk awake, or how to make VLC load less into RAM
Sounds like a power or sleep issue. Try doing a file copy while monitoring the logs