ESXi 6.5 boot on Dell T20

I've decided to migrate my ESXI 6.5 install from my USB 3.0/iSCSI install to an old intel 2.5" SSD HDD I had lying around to see how much faster it would be since I've virtualized pFSense on it.

My boot time seems really slow. After this boot message it hangs for 4-5 minutes then continues the boot.

vmw_ahci loaded successfully

My main concern is that I have pfsense running on it, and wouldn't want to be without internet for 5-10 minutes...

1. Is this normal? Is there anything that can be done to speed it up?

2. Assuming I can get past the boot issue, would I really benefit performance wise from a more modern SSD such as the samsung 850?