First question, does that laptop have a SSD? Most developer machines do these days, that's the single biggest improvement to build times you can make. Then look at CPU, IO, memory utilization during builds to see where improvements can be had.
Is that an NVME SSD or SATA SSD? NVME is about 4 times faster than SATA in terms of pure transfer bandwidth, though I'm not sure about random access speeds.
Well. it was the fastest when I bought it 3 years ago, it's SATA. I'm not buying another one, it would be wast of money, better get proper CPU and mobo.
NVMe makes sense only if you are either pushing bandwidth limits (e.g. processing large RAW 14-bit 4K/8K video on a scratch drive) or have hundreds of threads with concurrent I/O operations. In real world, you are barely going to notice any difference between SATA2 and SATA3 SSDs, not to mention M.2 PCIe ones.
