If it's being taxed, it's probably because some idiot spec'd an HDD that pulls resources too slowly For modern JS dev, you really need an SSD more than anything else. Mainly because the build/watch process is tracking many thousands of small files which is significantly worse on hdd. 60+ seconds vs. under a second for any change to take effect in the browser. This can be as much as an hour a day wasted. The 5 hours of wasted time in a few weeks are more costly than the upgrade to ssd.
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As to 512gb, it's because after all the software, that can take 100gb... creative assets well over that depending on the projects... it's easy to hit 240gb between the OS, software, projects, and assets.
Beyond that, show me off-the shelf hardware that can be configured with 16+gb ram and a 512gb SSD that doesn't have the other stuff I don't need?
Can you expand on that? I've seen this with folks in the movie/production industry but for webdev it seems like that's more of a want.
What's your daily task load, where integrated GPU and 32GB of ram are tasked?