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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?

Andrew S
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    I would recommend only getting the most commonly used platforms nowadays from your old computer if it's there. You can check on this link for the most commonly used Android platforms. https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html?utm_source=suzunone Of course unless you plan on still supporting the older versions then it's recommended to just copy them from your old computer than to download it all over again. – Hiroga Katageri May 26 '15 at 01:28
  • Patrick, I do plan to copy them across. However, I have plenty of mechanical disk space in my computer and was wondering if I would be better of putting the SDK there. – Andrew S May 26 '15 at 01:35
  • Oh, well it's better to just put them in the mechanical disk space then, since Google update's them from time to time and it won't affect Android Studio much since the SDK is separated from AVDs folder. – Hiroga Katageri May 26 '15 at 02:17
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    I ended yup trying them on the SSD and its amazingly fast. Start up times of Android are exceptional, we are talking 4 seconds instead of a minute (has was on my old computer, or my current laptop). Compile times also feel near instantaneous. Maybe I'll experiment by putting the same content on the mechanical drives and report back with my findings. – Andrew S May 26 '15 at 15:13

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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.

Andrew S
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    Waiting that second test ... :) – richardaum Jun 28 '15 at 14:35
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    @Richard, I just went through this process without moving the SDK over. It definitely is an improvement although I haven't seen AS good of results as this answer suggests but my core and RAM are also lower. I'd be interested if Andrew has done this test yet to see his findings. – uesports135 Mar 26 '16 at 12:44
  • Richard, I've been meaning to get round to it. I shall endeavor to do a proper comparison soon. Especially now as my Windows installation is now quite established and therefore performance may be different (due the the number of services and things running in the background, not to mention Windows updates). – Andrew S Mar 27 '16 at 02:10
  • Still waiting for the result on the second test – Ismail Iqbal Mar 18 '19 at 07:39
  • Is there going to be an update on this answer regarding moving SDK to HDD. – arunken Apr 26 '19 at 08:33
  • Actually, yes. I plan to do it in the next week or so. – Andrew S May 01 '19 at 00:00
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    There is no need to update this, SSD wins in all cases, AS needs to access SDK on the build, so SSD will be faster doing it – Aegon Jun 13 '19 at 23:31