XO-1 OFW occasionally has difficulty reading from my "permanent" SD card

[Mikus Grinbergs]

It may well be the quality of the non-high-priced SD cards I use, but
with q2e42 and later OFW versions, when several specific XO-1s are
booted, OFW will occasionally (but not consistently) time out when
trying to read the developer key from the SD card.  My usual bypass is
to unplug all external USB cables and reboot - that appears to get rid
of the timeout.  Is there some incantation that I can type in at the ok
prompt which would tell OFW to not time out so promptly ?

mikus