I have been learning houdini for some time and I am facing issues with my caching. Whenever I keep my sim for caching, my laptop starts to not respond or cook any frames after some time. I got better results when I cached my sim into my ssd. Still the problem continues after some frames.

Maybe I could buy a SSD and install it in my laptop but it supports only gen 3 nvme.

Will buying an external ssd work or should i go for upgrading my ssd to larger storage internaly.

Laptop specifications - intel i7, 2x8 gb 3200 MHz, 256 ssd, 1 tb hdd

I have just got a load of gen 4ssd and there is nothing in it compared to my Samsung gen 3 and an external drive will be even slower as it is limited by the USB speed

I just went from a 6900k to a 13900k the load times were very positive apart from that feel like I got a kick in the nuts for the amount it cost. pc still not finished. and trust me it still gets bogged down running at 5700MHZ 24 cores, 128gb 5600MHz ram. my rtx 2060 is the week link and is what shows up all the time as it has not much Vram to cope.

the m.2 ssd sticks are cheep for a 2TB gen4 so always useful.

I would look at how intense the workload is first and try optimise it before buying new parts.