What a hassle.
Ok so since I already had my COVR-2600 router online I thought lets try the USB drive on it.



All successful access.
One thing I noticed is that on the 2600s USB status page, the entire usb drive name is fully displayed. Something that the DIR0882 doesn't display. Just partial.
So then connected my PC to the DIR-882 along with the USB drive. For some reason I could not get the USB drive to be seen in networking. I rebooted both USB drive and 882.



So I thought maybe the router was in a bad state so I did a factory reset on it and skipped the wizard. Enabled Samba and saw the drive being access. Eventually I was able to access the drive using the Map Drive, use other credentials and browsing to the USB drive. The USB drive name is not fully seen in the UI. Only partial.
I ran some speed tests with a 2Gb file doing a Read then a couple of Writes from my Windows 10 PC:

Read from USB seems pretty good.

Write to USB started out at around 7-8Mb. Then I noticed it sped up to around 30Mb. Not sure what caused the initial slow Write speed.
