Why does my computer rename my external drives?

I have three daisy-chained LaCie external drives (1, 2, and 3.)  They have been working flawlessly for several years.  Suddenly last month, my iMac renamed drive 2 as drive 1, drive 1 as drive 3, etc.  It took me a bit to straighten it all out.  Yesterday it did it again.  What tha' HEY???!

I don't know if this applies, but I had a similar problem with a USB stick and the only way I found to prevent Spotlight from indexing the drive every time it was connected, was to create an empty file called .Spotlight-V100 in the root directory of the USB stick.
Strangely, my backup drive does not have that problem, I dragged it once in the Privacy pane of Spotlight and that seems to have done the trick.

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