[r00fus]

> This happened particularly frequently with virtual machines and/or Matlab, both of which can very easily exhaust any amount of memory. But maybe no one else is doing stuff like that.

I used to do a lot of heavy VM work on OSX - and back in the early days of VMWare Fusion v1 and later. I have never had the OS become unstable due to a storage bottleneck/thrashing.

Not that OSX is unbreakable, but it's been a whole lot better/more stable than my experience with Windows. At least on the Mac, a large chunk of the drivers are supported by the folks who wrote the OS.