@theboardrider - my first inclination is that the drive is misbehaving, intermittent faults are often hardware. Try a different cable and or port.
Can you copy the library to the macbook internal drive and try it there for a while, you'll have to tell calibre where it is via Library->Switch/Create. Another choice would be to copy the library to a thumb drive or an sd card and plug that in to the Macbook.
BR
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