[potatolicious]

True, but I suspect a 80GB SSD is a lot easier to afford for your common basement hacker than a box with 128GB of RAM.

[jmtulloss]

23GB of ram on EC2 is 1.60 an hour. Spin up 10 for $16.00. I think most hackers can afford that and it gives them enough computing power to match an 80GB SSD, I would say.

[ma2rten]

I guess most hackers would rather do it at home ...

[InclinedPlane]

By roughly a factor of 10, not including the motherboard costs (since most boards don't support 128gb of ram).