Choice of USB drive affects sound quality for Node (Gen 3)?

I compared at least four different designs of USB powered hard drives from a USB stick, to an external solid state SSD drive, to USB drives with a physical disk that must be powered with via the bus. My experience is that there is a difference in sound quality, with the physical HDD disks sounding “flat”, “dull” and “slow” compared to solid state and flash drives when used with a Bluesound Node functioning as music server. I discovered this because when I first got the Node, the only music I had on disk that wasn’t on my computer was on a small flash drive. I bought a cheap external USB bus powered HDD hard drive and I was disappointed with the sound compared with the flash drive - same files, same format, same cuts. Just dull and flat sounding. Yuk. I tried a different brand bus powered HDD hard drive, a little better. I tried a SSD drive, sounds much closer to the 16GB flash drive. Now I use the 2TB SSD drive for serving music and the hard drives for file backup. One of the drives tested was a WD Elements HDD 2TB external drive. The worst sounding to me. One was a Seagate One Touch 2TB external drive, slightly better sounding to me. One was a ScanDisk 2TB Extreme Portable SSD, noticeably better sounding. One was a 16GB flash drive from Target, slightly better sounding to me than the ScanDisk SSD. The Western Digital and Seagate HDDs use the same USB 3.0 connection and the ScanDisk SSD uses a USB C cable. For the two HDD drives I used the same stock cable that came with one of them. For the SSD, I used the stock USB C cable that came with it. The two HDD and the SSD drives are all external drives, in their own case and connected with a cable to the Node. Has anyone else experienced this sound quality issue related to USB drive type with their Node functioning as a file server?