I use VMware work station on a Asus gaming laptop with 24G ram, 1 Tb of solid state drive with most of my main machines on it. Then it has a 1.5Tb spinning drive for everything else. I backup everything on a Toshiba USB 3.0 3Tb external drive.
Forgot to mention the Asus has fast boot technology, I press power on and 6 seconds later I am logging in. Then 2 seconds to get desktop, launch VMWare and un-pause machine and 8 seconds later I have my main Windows 7 32 bit machine up and running. On the flip side my partner has a Dell Inspiron that takes 10 minutes to get to a login screen, then another 15 minutes to get a usable desktop.