Has anyone used Visual Studio on a 32 GB or 64 GB laptop?

[Accutron]

You can get a laptop with a much larger SSD than 32GB. All of my of my machines currently have Crucial 480GB or 512GB SSD boot disks, both desktop and laptop. I only use spinning disks for mass storage - currently 8x4TB Seagate ST4000DM000, but I have a drive making scary noises right now so I'll probably be going back to Western Digital next time. I wouldn't waste my money on anything in the 'netbook' or 'Chromebook' class. They are just paperweights waiting to happen.

The best performance and reliability for your money is going to be a used business class laptop that's a couple generations old, and install whatever capacity 2.5" SSD you want, up to 1TB. Anything with a Sandy Bridge or newer i3/i5/i7 is going to have plenty of power for something like Visual Studio, but the newer generations have much lower TDP and therefore better battery life versus performance. If you're concerned about personal security, datamining etc., I'd avoid anything newer than Windows 7, and anything running a brand new Skylake (i3/5/7-6xxx) processor. If you want decent integrated graphics, don't get anything older than Haswell (i3/5/7-4xxx).

Conventional spinning disk HDDs are sufficiently reliable, even in laptops, as long as you don't seriously abuse the computer. The big advantage of a SSD boot disk is speed.