Hard drive space on a laptop - network drives or cloud options?

[KevinViel]

I am working with genomics data.  In particular, for my PharmaSUG paper, I am working with the SARS-CoV-2 sequences in NCBI.  I am working a laptop, since my motherboard/memory went out on my tower about two years ago.  It only had 3 (4?) TB with two hard drives anyway.

Just to unzip the sequences, which are in fasta format, I need more space than my entire drive.  I am looking at alternatives, like the ZIP engine covered by Chris Hemedinger in the blogs.

Has anyone used NAS or cloud?  My experience with an external drive has not been great and just to copy files has been "slow".

Quizzically enough, I looked at towers again on Dell and found miniscule hard drives.  Yes, SDD, but even the early genomics I did with Sanger Sequencing puts a dent.  I believe my analytical SAS data sets were 60 GB.  (Oh, just wait until whole-genome sequencing with longitudinal metagenomics, epigenetics, and expression become the fad 🙂 ).

Any help is appreciated.

Thank you,

Kevin

[SASKiwi]

I'd suggest a new desktop PC with as much fast SSD storage as you can afford. Desktops are cheaper and more reliable and upgradable than laptops. You could add SSD network drives to your laptop but your CPU processing wont change.

Cloud storage is really designed for backing up and is too slow processing with local computers. It's a different story if you go for a completely cloud solution but I'm assuming here you don't have access to anything like that. 

[Kurt_Bremser]

What kinds of connectIvity does your laptop provide? USB 3.0 or 2.0? 100Mbit or Gbit Ethernet?

If it's only USB 2, but Gbit Ethernet, a NAS with SSDs might be your best bet, but a USB 3 SSD would be much better.