Actual minimum specs for an Oxford Nanopore MinION?

[blainetoro]

Hi all - I'm planning to purchase a MinION sequencer. It seems the IT requirements are fairly high (8GB RAM, i5/i7 processor, 500 GB SSD). I have a Macbook Pro 2016 wih 8 GB RAM, 2.9 GHz i5 processor BUT only 128 GB SSD; they dont support newer macbooks with M1/M2 chips.

I was wondering if anyone had any idea how much data a nanopore generates per each run. I was hoping I could just export the data to an external drive between runs but have no idea if this is possible. Any help would be much appreciated! <3 xoxo

[gringer]

ONT does support newer macbooks with M1/M2 chips. In fact if you're interested in doing real-time basecalling without an NVIDIA video card, those chips are pretty much the only way to do it.

As a direct answer to your question, the typical yield of a MinION sequencing run is about 5-15 gigabases, which in produced gzipped FASTQ files will take up to about 30 GB.

However, if you are only able to do fast basecalling during sequencing, or no basecalling at all (likely if you're talking about minimum specifications), then you'll need to do the basecalling offline, and the raw POD5 data format used by Nanopore sequencers takes up about ten times the FASTQ storage space (i.e. 100-300 GB per run).

It is possible to make do without this, and shunt data files off the laptop elsewhere as needed, but the simplest, easiest, cheapest approach is to get an SSD that will fit an entire run.

[Cooks]

David gave the cliff notes. One point of I'd like to add is that we recently have upgraded some sequencing laptops to M3 Max chips from Intel/Nvidia architectures and these seem to not be very well supported. It took me almost 72 hours to re-call a dRNA Sequencing run from fast to high.

This went way faster on comparable Nvidia hardware. According to ONT their software will always be optimized to Nvidia. I was kind of confused because at some point the listed the MacBook Pros as recommended laptops.

[Markiyan]

For data aquisition (basecalling off) even 12 years old laptop w dual+ core i3/i5/i7 with 16GB+ of DDR3+ ram with 1tb SSD would do (handy during powercuts/blackouts).

For basecalling full sized gaming RTX 3060+ 12GB+ is STRONGLY recommended...

Avoid apple due to very limited RAM/storage/TDP, and no upgradebility...

So either swap your apple for a good gaming desktop or laptop with dedicated nvidia card with 12GB of vram or get a separate gaming rig for ONT...