Adding nofail alone is enough for not preventing your system from booting when the drive is absent, and still allows it to automatically mount at boot when present.
gnome-disks acts as a frontend for /etc/fstab, so using the former to change mount options effectively applies in the latter.
For mounting using systemd, see: [root tip] [How To] Use systemd to mount ANY device
See my first quote reply.
Alternatively, you can use systemd instead of /etc/fstab for mounting your optional drive, so that it will naturally skip it when absent. See my previous quote reply.
That would be very tricky between Linux systems, if possible at all, because that would imply those options must be shared and accessible at boot time from all your systems.
That seems impossible to share between Linux and Windows systems as they don’t share mount setting format: AFAIK Linux uses files whereas Windows uses registry.
See my previous quote replies.