Visual Studio 2015 Build Time for Small Project

There are many questions on SO about improving the build time in Visual Studio (cf. here, here, etc.), but the vast majority of answers are aimed at projects which are fairly large. Many of these answers (e.g. increasing amount of parallel builds) will only have a marginal effect on small projects, which is what motivates this question.

I am using Visual Studio Express 2015 with one solution, a single C++ project, containing only three files: an 800-line source file, and two .h files. I am running on Windows 7, my processor is Intel Core i5, CPU 2.60GHz, RAM 8GB.

My build time is a staggering 1 minute or more.

Based on suggestions in other SO threads, I have emptied my %temp% and prefetch directories, but this only had a marginal effect. I changed my code to remove as many warnings as possible. I removed all the unnecessary files from the VS directories for my project. My antivirus is disabled.

Here and here it was suggested that an SSD could help. I find it hard to believe, however, that my performance should be this poor with HDD.

I would be glad to hear any suggestions about this issue. Thank you in advance.