Storage Spaces: Pooled drives show up in Disk Manager

I have a standalone Server 2022, with an 8-bay USB enclosure.

The enclosure houses 6 drives. These drives have been added to a storage pool.

Recently some drives show a warning "Lost communication". At the same time the drives show up in Disk Manager, with a "Storage Spaces Protective Partition".

If I move drives around in the 8 bays and reboot I get different drives going offline, and there is no pattern WRT which bay. All drives come online but not at the same time. Basically it's HDD whack-a-mole.

I mounted them using a few separate USB disk docks, and then all drives came online. So the drives are fine, passed tests. So did the storage pool.

I also attached the 8-bay enclosure to a Windows 11 laptop, saw the same pattern - some drives are offline.

SO: For some reason some drives are attached to Disk Manager (and are listed in DISKPART) whereas other drives are properly attached to the Storage Spaces driver.

QUESTION: Can I control what the Storage Spaces driver does with drives? Can I force drives to be attached to the Storage Spaces driver instead of being mounted to the file system directly?

I'm getting another enclosure as a workaround, but of course would like to understand what is happening, and if there is a remedy.