So, total hardware noobie here. My laptop is giving me shit long Android studio build times and i am thinking of adding a ssd in it .thoughts?My current laptop specs are win10/8gb ram/1 tb hdd/ i5 7th gen

Recently i had a battery repair where that guy confirmed that i don't have some kind of ssd slot (idk the name) but ssd could be placed in the area of hdd, and hdd could be attached in the place of optical disk using "caddy" something.

On hearing this, my friend is advising me not to get caddy attached as it would still somehow provide slower speeds than just the ssd. is it true?

I was thinking of going for a 240gb ssd but if my 1tb hard disk is removed, i would have a to rethink about the softwares i use, since my C:drive is usually taking around 500 gb itself

i5 7th gen sounds like a dual core (unless it's a HQ part). How do you even live without an ssd?

@electrineer i5 are usualy 4 core 4 threads in laptops

You dont have a ssd that is a first, then if you want faster builds you need a better cpu, gpu only matters in games i think.

Depends on the laptop but yes, dvd drive can be replaced with a sdd or hdd. It is the same interface, you will have to cover the hole though.

For faster builds, you should also keep your projects on SSD. Having a secondary drive in a caddy won't slow down your pc at all, but anything stored on that HDD will still be slow. SSDs aren't that expensive anymore, and no matter how good the rest of your PC is, the HDD is such a huge bottleneck that swapping it for an SSD will be, by far, the biggest performance jump you'll ever experience

Could you specify the brand / model of the notebook?

I'd double check that first.

You might not have an M.2 slot, but even a SATA SSD is faster than an HDD.
So I'd say go for that little upgrade too

@Gregozor2121 that's just wrong

@electrineer haha wait before i tell you that i have ran intelliJ in my pentium 4 laptop when i first started in college. 4 months in and i was demanding for a better laptop more than fresh air.

Although it has been 3 years and this guy haven't disappointed me much until recently when my project sizes started to grow

@CptFox thanks . I think i would be asking that guy to transfer my windows on ssd and then install studio and chrome on it ( the 2 most laggy tools on my laptop)

Btw i checked and my friend was actually talking about some "indexing", that our os keeps on indexing files in the background so if an hdd is kept installed via caddy there would still be a performance hit. Is that true?

@curioustools I've got a Pentium 3 laptop you would enjoy

Honestly, biggest problem I see here is the HDD, Android Studio is way, way, better on an SSD.

@curioustools Indexing is a thing, and it'll be slower for the HDD part, but will also consume less ressources, as indexing will spend most of its time waiting for data from the HDD, which is fetched asynchronously. It won't have any visible effect on your experience. And anyway, if the storage is there, it'll be indexed regardless of whether it's through a caddy or something else. In my opinion, having 1TB available at all times to help keep your SSD free of junk is worth the barely existing cost that is indexing.

You guys are awesome! Thanks for the suggestions. Any particular company of ssd i should be wary of ? I am thinking of samsung but may adjust for other companies due to budget

@curioustools Samsung's are usually nice but make sure to check the type. Others are fine too and often less expensive.

PS: Also look at the w/r speeds.

@curioustools check benchmarks if you want to save a buck. Avoid cacheless models.

@electrineer Which part?

@Gregozor2121 until 6th gen, mobile i5 was always dual core. 6th and 7th gen can be either 2 or 4 cores. After that they can be 2, 4, or 6 cores.

@electrineer mine is i5 7th gen dual core. I guess its a very rare info that non tech people would check. I did a little google search on it and turns out its impossible to know about the cores when the shop salesman only tells you that "this laptop is i5 7th gen" .

It could only be found if we have a physical running laptop or cross checking the actual processor id from the Intel website

( also quora says that for amd, all processors are dual core, but since its quora, am not sure)

When i was buying the laptop , i barely knew what ddr3 and ddr4 ram is 😅

@curioustools I use a laptop with the HDD on a caddy and a SSD in the HDD slot. It's a great configuration, the caddy is literally just a physical adapter to make the HDD fit in the optical drive bay, it has nothing to do with the electronics of the SATA port that the optical drive connects to. If the optical drive connects to a reduced bandwidth SATA port, it's doesn't matter anyway since the HDD can't saturate a full bandwidth SATA 3 in any case so the optical drive port should be fine. You're not storing your programs on the HDD anyway.

You want a 240GB Samsung Evo SSD or similar in the main hard drive slot. This should have your OS, all heavy software, and current project files. The HDD in the optical drive caddy should be used for longer term storage, games, etc.

No slowdown whatsoever from just a SSD. They're literally different drives. If anything your HDD should perform better than it does now because it's not being hammered by the OS all the time.

Indexing is a non-issue. The OS will index your drive regardless of where it's connected anyway (if you have it enabled). Since it's under lesser load, indexing should actually be faster for the HDD, and even if it isn't, it doesn't matter because again, all the stuff that needs low latency should be on the SSD as it is. SSD indexing is so fast that you're not even going to notice anyway.

My laptop - HP Probook 440G2 with a dual core i5 4th gen. Chugs along just fine with the SSD.