One of the things to watch for even with what seems like a powerful system is that so much performance can come from cache memory
Found this out the hard way professionally , someone at IBM had the not very bright idea of powering their RAID disk arrays cache memory with a battery . Battery goes flat and everything starts running at a tenth normal speed . You can see the same sort of thing accessing a folder on a conventional disk that you have not been into for a year , the disk cache prioritises the most recent files .
Modern SSD drives don't have these issues and are so large now they are the way to go . But for people like me with an old laptop with an old fashioned hard drive you can get better performance putting the game on a USB stick or a SD card rather than the hard drive .
Something for people who's laptop is more the Ford model T variety