During a sequencing run, the software writes a large amount of raw current data to disk in real time hence the 1 TB SSD requirement.

The intermediate files are further packaged into their final compressed file types, primarily .fast5 and .fastq files. The sequencing script progresses until all intermediate files are finished processing, the run is stopped, or basecalling is stopped. You can find more information here.

The disk usage with default MinKNOW options (.fast5 files use vbz compression, .fastq files use gzip compression):

- Fast5 + FastQ: Every 1 Gbase of sequence data takes up ~6.5 GBytes of space.

- FastQ only: Every 1 Gbase of sequence data takes up ~0.5 GBytes of space.