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The 64GB HDD on the Chromebook is quite limiting too though. (Especially if you develop with multiple virtual machines.) I suppose you could use an external hdd but that seems bulky and I'm not sure it would be as quick.

I might try and hold on to my x220 for another year and see if 2016 offers any better ultrabooks.

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Between more RAM and a bigger hard disk I'd always pick more RAM. On my development machine I have a very minimal setup (i3, no desktop environment, Emacs, compiler, debugger etc.) and not more than a couple of big repositories checked out (Linux, Hotspot). I can see why this might not work for other kinds of development setups though.

I also use i3 with vim and a browser as my setup, but I would always go for SSD more then anything. The whole machine feels snappier when compiling and running stuff, although I do back it up with 8GB of ram.

I am using mSATA SSD drive via USB3.0 and it is quite fast and small.

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