Optical Drive/s eject on startup - SSD Slow Boot time also

Me brain-storming & thinking out loud about how I would go about troubleshoot this:

Every time you zap pram you need to reset the default boot volume.

I never use Onyx after looking at it and keeping it around for awhile, I have mixed idea that people are looking for a problem to fix and do I trust it? gets mentioned enough.

LG BR - can you take that out of the picture to test with it not connected?

Wacom Tablet - take it out of the equation for testing

USB3 - CallDigit? that has USB3 + SATA and looks and sounds good.

Try w/o it also.

Just because there is nothing connected - I've seen a cable that just by being plugged in was the cause of slow boot.

Clone the OS to SSD? sounds like you didn't do that which in the past has had mixed results (sometimes with bad consequences and hard to know why, too many variables) but a clean install should be perfect. One person's though took "ages" to do what should have been very quick.

I assume you would also clone the SSD to backup as image or to another drive.

How does it boot from a 300GB partition off a platter?

3 x 1TB: are these an array? do any of them have a system on it? sounds like you don'[t as it might otherwise choose non-SSD boot drive.

An SSD from restart sometimes is fast(er) but from cold boot the system may not know it is there and how to send a signal to it?

What does OWC say? about SSD, about the USB3 card.

Even having 32GB RAM can take longer to POST.