RAM, hard drive requirement for RNA-seq analysis

[arrchi]

Hi there,

We want to perform RNA-seq on 200 samples using illumina technique. I wonder what the minimum RAM and hard drive we should get to do the analysis? Right now, I have a MAC computer with 8GB RAM and 500GB free space. Is it enough?

Thanks.

[Wallysb01]

Depends on how many jobs you want to do in parallel. Aligning a single illumina run, ~100M reads, to a 2 Gbp reference took my 2.8 GHz i5, about 4 days. Each run used ~2GB of ram. So I could run 4 runs in parallel, thus an entire flow cell took about 8 days. If you're trying to align 200 illumina runs, I think you need to look outside your personal computer, unless you want this process to take 200 days. But, if you're multi-plexing those samples using barcodes, then it might not take quite as long.