I need some USB educat’in

I love my Oppo 203 where I can plug in an external hard drive with any amount of music and navigate through the music folders to find any music I want. I can also navigate through files on a NAS but like it better locally connected. I usually connect a monitor to the Oppo’s HDMI port to see where I am navigating using the remote. I now need another device that provides this capability for my second system. Best if there is an HDMI port but I could use an app on my tablet for the navigation.

What is not clear to me is what specs should I look for to determine if a device has this navigating capability and can handle an external HD with lots of music. My BS Node 2 has a USB port but it will choke if I try to connect a HD with a large amount of music as its USB port is intended to be used only for thumb drives with smaller amounts of files. Their online FAQ even says this now but you wouldn’t know it by just reading the Node 2 specs.

So what should I be looking for in a devices’ specs that would tell me it has this capability to navigate folders like I want and not try to index everything by Song / Album / Artist and then choke like my Node 2 does?