I ran into some odd problems with the DisplayLink drivers after a couple years of success in Win 7 so I recently made the jump to Win 8.1. Most of my real work happens in my VM's so I don't mind it. My laptop has two 500 GB SSD's and has room for two more drives via mSATA cards. When I run out of room for VMs I'll go ahead and start populating the mSATA slots. I recently picked up a USB 3.0 256GB thumb drive and use it for VM portability between machines so I can leave my big laptop docked at work & take a lighter one on business trips.

And yeah - you are right about very little downtime when reinstalling stuff. While my peers will be out for a week because of an OS or hardware failure I can be up and running again in no time at all.