Suspiciously long assets importing time

I want to state in very beginning that i am student, and i can't afford any new hardware atm, so i'm hoping for more software related tips

The problem itself:

When i try to import new project from unity learn section (2D assets kit) it literally takes about 20-30 minuets if not more to import evrything into unity. Is this typical importing time, or there is something wrong with my laptop?

I'm using lenovo ideapad 510-15ikb, which runs on:
i5 - 72000U,
8 gigs RAM,
HDD drive.

I get that HDD may be the bottleneck here, but is there way to pass it somehow? Or should i just keep on going with that what i got now and try to upgrade to SSD in future?

 

It depends on the specific asset what the bottleneck is, but generally Unity deals with reading/writing large numbers of small files and that's about the worst case scenario for an HDD. Fortunately with real projects you're developing importing large asset kits is a rather infrequent occurrence.

I don't know if asset importing is multithreaded, but overall the engine has much improved multithreading compared to a few years ago. Unfortunately your 2 core CPU isn't going to get as much advantage from that compared to a CPU with higher core count. I do a lot of my development out of convenience on a 2 core i7 laptop even though my 6 core i7 desktop is a much better machine, and the difference in performance is quite noticeable just from the CPU.

 

This question came up a few weeks ago as well. In the following thread, s/he bought a SSD hard-drive, but it didn't fix the problem.

Here is my answer why I believe a SDD does not entirely solve import performance issues and some ideas how to speed it up:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/unitys-long-loading-importing.600115/#post-4032901