> BTW my HDD is an Intel X-25M G2, and I wouldn't be surprised if a platter HDD would > be the limiting factor if that's what someone has.
I run a split system - in Fedora everything but /home is on the SSD, /home is on a large conventional platter drive both for space and to avoid excessive writes on the flash. Thus when compiling GCC itself and all the system headers and libraries come off the SSD.