External Drive Renamed by MacOS

I have observed a strange issue with MacOS renaming an external drive without my intervention.

The scenario:

1. The boot volume is the internal drive provided with the iMac.
2. I have a separate external Samsung SSD hard drive connected via Thunderbolt called Users6. This contains the Users folder for one of the accounts on the machine.
3. Without any action from me, the Mac will rename the drive, adding a space and the number 1 to the name of the drive. "/Volumes/Users5" becomes "/Volumes/Users5\ 1" rendering my login profile invalid.
4. The Mac will load a "default" profile on the boot volume for the user.
5. If I rename the drive, (e.g., "Users6") and update the home folder for my user, the functionality is fully restored.
6. The old drive names are maintained in /Volumes. They have the following shown when running ls -l: "drwxrwx--- 3 root _analyticsusers"
7. This behavior has been happening for several MacOS versions.

I would appreciate any insights about why this is happening and any measures I can take to prevent recurrence. I have renamed the drive numerous times to address this issue.

Thank you.