You have a misconception about the workload of your typical database server. It's not about the amount of data it's storing, it's about
1. compute and memory bandwidth to serve complicated queries
2. IO
You can't scale memory bandwidth beyond some pretty low limit on one machine. You can't scale IO bandwidth beyond some limit. To give you an example, I've seen database servers with 20GB of data being so overloaded by compute requirements of complex queries that they needed to be scaled horizontally.
But like this server has two 96 core processors. Moreover, we are talking about development environment for a single developer and maybe one or two users to try out their changes. It should be good enough, no?
I mean I expect things to be slower I guess but to test for correctness and spec?
1. compute and memory bandwidth to serve complicated queries 2. IO
You can't scale memory bandwidth beyond some pretty low limit on one machine. You can't scale IO bandwidth beyond some limit. To give you an example, I've seen database servers with 20GB of data being so overloaded by compute requirements of complex queries that they needed to be scaled horizontally.