The disk I plan on leaving attached. I'll look into options for mount; is option "nofail" supposed to mean that it will give up trying to mount if it is non-available?

systemd-analyze blame
the top four are nmbd.service 10.8s and hciuart.service 6.4s
then raspi-config.service 1.3s and smbd.service 1s

one is the net bios name server i was pretty sure I dont use that so i disabled it with
sudo systemctl stop nmbd
sudo systemctl disable nmbd

I do use bluetooth, It seems like it is unusually slow. Reading dmesg:
uart-pl011 3f201000.serial: no DMA platform data
brcmfmac: power management disabled
and brcmfmac: brcmf_c_preinit_dcmds; look like firmware warnings

raspi-config is probably nominal, though I don't know what it is calling or doing at startup.

I use samba smbd.service.