I don't know anything about bioinformatics but I'm going to do RNAseq and ChIPseq analysis in R later this year and I would like to know if a Macbook Pro (2018) with a i5 processor, 256 gb SSD and 8 gb RAM would be enough for basic bioinformatics. My model organism has a 12 Mpb genome and I am hesitant if I need the 16 gb RAM and 512 gb SSDA which is way more expensive.
8 gb ram is too low if you are going for RNA seq analysis. Even if you have a small genome or transcriptome of your sample, but the files which are generated even during quality check and alignment, require a lot of computational power and space for analysis. So a minimum of 32 gb ram will be more suitable, so as to get the analyses done in a feasible amount of time
If you have access to a cloud-based virtual machine or virtual laboratory e.g. Galaxy, it is possible to process a range of sequence analysis tasks without the need to purchase an HPC. In terms of storage, would be worth acquiring an expansion hard drive for backing up files locally.
ssda is less mandatory than ram memory (which is really needed here depending what your are doing 8 Gb may be not enough but is true that a 12 Mb genome is rather small so I cannot says), also NGS produces a lot of big files usually and need hard drive memory, because hard drive disk is currently way less expensive than ssd it is favored you may have 1 ot 2 To for the price of your ssda, what is done is often have a small ssd (50-100 Gb) for the operating system. for processor for scientific calculation the more is better than the fastest. duo or quad core can be really nice because a lot of bioinformatics tools make use of multi-cpu architecture.
Hi Adrián,
Using your own laptop for such analyses is never the recommended option. In a bioinformatics research group, you are usually provided with a computer or access to a HPC (High Performance Cluster), which will do the real computations. To actually pre-visualize the raw data, or to explore the tidy results, almost any laptop will do the function.
In any case, if money is an issue, I wouldn't go for a Mac at all. You can find many FreeDOS Laptops in which you can install a free Linux version of your choice. Then you can wisely invest your money in the SSD/HDD you want and the RAM you want. A couple of years ago I faced a similar situation as yours (in structural bioinformatics) and I bought a laptop with a 4 core i5 processor, NVIDIA 950M GPU, 240 GB SSD and 16 GB of RAM with ~850€, which was a pretty good value for money. A month ago I replaced the original (SATA) SSD by a M.2 SSD with the same capacity, and also added a 1 TB HDD, which is more than enough for me. If I was to buy a new laptop, I wouldn't chose one with less features than my current one has. Today you can probably find even better options, but never in a Mac.
Hope that helps!
You can install simple R programs on your laptop and see if you have access to an HPC (or a linux machine) for the remaining more demanding tasks. Best wishes.
Macbook Pro 2018 is fine to run R, sure. You can install RStudio as well.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Computer Science and Engineering
- Bioinformatics