Took about 10 hours to DL and sync blockchain on an Ultrabook with i5 Core, SSD and 4GB RAM. Blockchain is about 8GB. The longest part seemed to be the last few months of the blockchain. Seemed like there were more peers syncing from me and less peers with newer blocks available. I guess that is to be expected ??
For SSD this sounds way to much. You were using computer for something else then syncing? Maybe syncing Bitcoin wallet also?
Nope! Nothing CPU or RAM heavy.
It started quicker, and then once I had a 'base' I was getting a lot of connections from peers who I was ahead of and this seemed to slow things down a lot (that was my guess anyway). Either that or my Ultrabook is not so Ultra! I upgraded the SSD in it too ... :/