Every time you can't fit a whole database on your hard drive, you greatly add to your work. If you have to split up a database into two pieces, you almost double your work. Buy hard drive space until it hurts. Remember that you need 300 to 500 mb for programs and because relational database programs make temporary back-up files, you need twice the space of the largest database you expect to work with. It's not unusual to have 3 to 5 gb on a machine.
Drives are cheap now.
Consequently, vendors aren't loading machines with as much memory as they should and you'll probably have to ask for more. As a rule, you need 16 mb to do CAR work without suffering a serious deterioration in performance. Relational databases are memory hogs. Expect a 30 percent performance improvement in your database applications when you go from 8 mb to 16 mb and another 5 to 10 percent from 16mb to 32 mb. The Central Processing Unit, or CPU, is the most expensive single component in your machine.