I couldn’t say for sure on this, and I’m not sure how to otherwise test. As you suspect I also suspect that there might be something different about that enclosure since it is USB which first shows an error, and you can’t really make a conclusion about the hard drive side of things until USB works correctly.
About the only test I can think of to narrow it further is to swap some known “standard” hard drive into the enclosure (if you can), and see if the USB issues remain.