I have just upgraded to a new Intel Core i7 (4th gen) PC featuring a 512gb SSD, about 5TB of mechanical storage, and 16GB of DDR3 ram. I am now planning to set up the Android SDK and Android studio. I was wondering, on my old computer the Android SDK,that's with all platforms >= v1.6 (Cupcake), comes in at 22.6gb. Therefore, is there a significant benefit to installing them on the SSD, or would the speed benefits not outweigh the costs of the extra space and writes that would be consumed on the SSD?
Ok to add some closure to this posting let me summarize my findings of trying Android studio on both my Mushkin Reactor 515gb SSD and on a 1TB Samsung Spin Point mechanical 7500rpm SATAII hard drive (32 mb cache). I'm running Windows 8 with 16gb ram, on an Intel Core i7 (4970k Devils Canyon) with an Asus Z97-A motherboard which supports SATA 3. All drives are connected via the same SATA 3 controller.
On the SSD start up times of android studio are approximately 7 to 8 seconds, build times are on apps of low/medium complexity (14 activities and several standard Java classes) were building in 5 seconds.
On the HD start up times were much slower, coming in at approximately 40 seconds. Project build times of the same project as above were coming in at approximately the 30 to 40 second mark.
So for me SSD wins. I find when working on SSD that Android studio feels near instantaneous, there is no, or at least very little, of hanging about for ages whilst the Gradle build faffs about.
A limitation in this experement is that I did not try it with the Android studio on the SSD and the SDK platforms on a mechanical disk. I will try this soon and report back.