Hey @Jim_Ridgway,
Thanks for your patience!
The name of this drive is coming from the drive itself - ST18000N_E000 is the hardware name for a Seagate 2TB drive, rather than anything directly Roon related.
When you plug a USB drive into your Nucleus, Roon assigns it a folder path based on the drive’s name. Normally, this isn’t an issue, but if your drive name is changing to a random number each time, Roon may see it as a new drive, which could cause problems.
That said, as long as no tracks appear in two locations at the same time, making changes to your drive shouldn’t cause any issues. If you update the path to a watched folder (rather than changing something inside the folder itself), your library should remain unaffected.
We understand how this could be frustrating, and we can submit a feature request to improve how Roon maintains storage drive states in these cases. Let us know if you’d like us to do that!