[blackflame7000]

I will say it is awfully annoying to have the Ubuntu boot process freeze because some USB external hard drive didn't initialize it time. Just skip it for god sakes, don't make me have to find a keyboard plug it into the machine just to press S to skip mounting and boot.

[voltagex_]

This seems to be an odd systemd problem. I'm not sure what makes it decide that this USB drive / SD card / SMB share is so utterly critical that it's worth hanging the boot for 3+ minutes.

A brand new Debian install on an SSD with UEFI can get me to the desktop in about 4 seconds. Please keep it that way.

[dekhn]

this predates systemd on ubuntu- ubuntu has done this for some time. I don't know why. To fix this, you would have to configure this with nobootwait.