How much weights a million reads

Question

[gubrins]

Heys, I have a quick question:

I was wondering how much weights a million Illumina reads of let's say 100 bp long in Gb. May be a silly question but I did not find that information. There is any website to check this?

Thanks in advance!

[Devon Ryan]

You usually just download the files. A million reads would be <1GB, so not large

[gubrins]

It is because in some websites they talk about million reads and anothers in Gb of data and I wanted to compare both. Thanks!

Answer 1

[lieven.sterck]

In our lab we use the following 'conversion', mainly in the frame of data management things:

20M 100nt, SE illumina reads, ~1Gb in size.

this is in gzipped file size, for 1M, you can thus roughly divide by 20 , so that will be 0,05 Gb (50Mb)

keep in mind these are ballpark estimates, not accurate to the byte (actual file size depends on the file content of course and the efficiency in zipping it)

[gubrins]

Thank you very much! I imagine it is quite difficult to get a general estimate because of what you mention, but at least this information helps me to make some comparisons, thanks again!