Hey fellow Biostars,
I'm tasked with buying a workstation for my research group (metagenomics) and would like some advice/pointers. I know this question has been asked several times before; however, given that tech advances each year, I thought it would be appropriate to ask it again in 2020. A workstation is preferred for our work as we will not have the technical support for a server.
I realise tools like Kraken2 and Centrifuge take masses of memory to build the databases. Therefore, my biggest concern is RAM. The following spec is what I'm seriously considering.
Spec: CPU: Intel® Xeon® Gold 6252 24-Core (2.1 GHz, 3.7GHz Turbo, 35.75M L3 Cache, 48 threads). RAM: 384GB Kingston DDR4 2666MHz ECC Registered (12 x 32GB). Disk Space: 2 x 4TB Samsung 860 QVO 2.5" SSD, SATA 6Gb/s (upto 550MB/sR | 520MB/sW) (RAID1). Motherboard: ASUS® WS C621E SAGE (DDR4 RDIMM, 6Gb/s, CrossFireX/SLI). External storage: Existing NAS QNAP (10TB) granted for archiving processed datasets and raw reads. Operating system: Latest Ubuntu OS.
Are these specs more than capable of crunching clinical metagenomic data of bacterial origin? There are no plans to complete any eukaryotic genome or transcriptome assembly work. I would like to extend to 512GB RAM, however, my budget does not allow for this The external storage can also be expanded as required.
Last question: Should I also add a third HDD in for storage of the OS? Is this needed/recommended nowadays?
Thanks for the advice!
