Since the current model is an external USB 2.0 thumb drive, I'm curious if moving the boot to an internal NVME partition as Spaceinvaderone talks about will speed up the boot time? Because right now it takes 3-5 min. for my system to come online and I'd love for it to be faster.

Unless you are using a very slow flash drive problaly won't notice much difference; normal reboot time with a desktop board and a reasonable number of devices is less than 2 minutes, server board BIOS or having plenty of devices will make it take a little longer; for my servers, the range is 2 to 4 minutes, and for me not really much difference in speed when between booting from a good USB flash drive or NVMe USB.