Problem with an external SATA dock - Drive letters getting “stuck” even after a reboot (Win10)

This might be a bit of a weird one, but hopefully one of you has encountered it before and get point me in the right direction to fix it.

I’m using an external (USB3) two-bay SATA dock on a windows 10 PC. I have a number of 3.5 SATA drives, ranging from 4 to 10TB in size, which I’ve formatted as NTFS. The dock had been working fine for several years, and supposedly allows for hot-swapping, though I tend to do a full power down before putting a different HDD in, just out of an abundance of caution.

Everything had been working fine with this setup for a few years, but at some recent point my system no longer seems to be correctly recognizing when I place a different HDD into the dock.

Let’s say I have a HDD in the dock mounted as drive M:. Previously, when I shut the system down and swapped in a different HDD (one which had been formatted as drive O:, say) upon boot, Windows would correctly list disk O: as an available drive.

But now, in that same scenario, the drive mapping will *remain* as M:

If I try to do anything with the disk, like double-clicking to open it, I’ll immediately get an alert to the effect that “There’s a problem with the Recycle Bin on disk M:, would you like to empty it now?”. This alert will continue to pop up throughout the session regardless of whether I click yes or no.

This is happening with multiple disks, and I’ve even tried wiping and reformatting some of them and it still happens with those disks. I also swapped the SATA dock, hoping to rule out a hardware failure. I also ran a full chkdsk on a couple of the drives, and that didn’t help either.

If I open Disk Management and remap the drive mapping, it seems to resolve the issues, *but only for that session*. If I shutdown, the next time I swap to a different disk and startup the issue returns. What also seems really weird to me is that I used this exact setup (same PC, same SATA dock, same drives) without issue for several years prior to now.

Does this sound remotely familiar to anyone? I’m genuinely at a loss as to how to troubleshoot this.