[bcoates]

If the built-in disk has low enough latency, your memory needs go way down as giant predictive disk caches become unnecessary and swapping is less of a performance killer.

Moving to SSD let me put a VM on my 8GB laptop that stole half the RAM without destroying my ability to run a couple of visual studios, office and a pile of chrome tabs. Under 4GB and spinning disk that was unworkable.

RAM needs might be stagnating for a few years as high-performance flash becomes commonplace and applications don't have to be as aggressive about keeping everything in memory.

[binarycrusader]

You're suggesting that dramatically shortening the lifetime of my SSD through needless writes is better than simply adding more memory?

And what if my working set is incapable of fitting into that measly 4G of memory (which likely will only be 3GB at most once the OS and Visual Studio is loaded) even with swapping? I can tell you right now that's easy to do with Visual Studio with even "relatively" small applications once you start loading debug symbols.