[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.