Hello, I have several thousand disks, but I have my favorite disks, and these are the ones I have on several 128gb Microsd disks. Most of my albums are streaming. The microsd is connected by a usb adapter. A usb memory is better than a mechanical disk, but it is not the same as a microsd disk (we always talk about dynamics, the rest Yes is the same or very similar). I have not tested with a ssd disk, it should be the same or very similar to microsd. I’ll do that test. I have noticed this for some time, but I have not mentioned it until other people have noticed it, too, without explaining anything about it.
Should not have problems for Volumio to recognize your hard drive provided the hard disk power is independent of the rapsberry pi, I do not know if there are limitations of size, up to 2 tb I have not had problem.