Ubuntu 16.04 boots into emergency mode when fstab entry not really present

I have a USB drive at work that's specified in fstab (although the pathname says RAID it's not an array, just a single USB drive of 2 Tb). In 14.04, when I booted the computer without the drive coected, I would get an option during boot to skip that and then it would boot just fine. In 16.04 however, it boots into emergency mode instead. I can get around this by booting in startup mode but it's really aoying. How can I get around this? My fstab entry for the drive looks like this:

#USB drive
UUID=1ade5a24-10bf-4010-aa99-75fb16d4ce32    /home/user_id/RAID    ext4    rw,user    0    0