# Hardware recommendation for medium size data sets

**URL:** https://discourse.paraview.org/t/hardware-recommendation-for-medium-size-data-sets/4272
**Category:** ParaView Support
**Created:** [May 6, 2020, 1:48pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/hardware-recommendation-for-medium-size-data-sets/4272 "2020-05-06T13:48:25Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 3

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### Author: ![Quefrency](https://discourse.paraview.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/q/e0b2c6/32.png) [@Quefrency](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/Quefrency)
#### Post date: [May 12, 2020, 3:12pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/hardware-recommendation-for-medium-size-data-sets/4272/3 "2020-05-12T15:12:07Z")

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Hi,  
From my limited experience, my suggestion is that you need to look at how much RAM you have. I suggest you look at getting 64 GB or more. Also the speed at which you can read the data will make a difference, so the faster the hard drive the better, ie NVME \> SSD \> HD.

The format at which you data is in will also make a difference.  
This post might help understanding the background but in short get the openfoam data into vtm format it will save processing time.

> [@Paraview unable to read lagrangian data (openFoam)](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/paraview-unable-to-read-lagrangian-data-openfoam/3456/8):
>
> @mwestphal Additionally we may wish to have a sticky FAQ (for the OpenFOAM question). The problem (and confusion) originates from an internal OpenFOAM change to use barycentric coordinates in its lagrangian framework. In the [openfoam.com](http://openfoam.com) version: The positions file contains tuples of (x,y,z, cellId). This file is generally ignored by OpenFOAM (in favour of the coordinates file), but is readable by ParaView. The format is consistent with what older versions of OpenFOAM generated. The coordina…

and [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoUygiAk4fc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoUygiAk4fc)

Careful of Index, it is not a silver bullet that will solve your volume rendering problems. I have not be able to get one of my openFOAM simulations to be able to render with index, I have tried with a snappyhex mesh and a cfmesh mesh. I keep getting a topology error. So if I need to do a volume render I still resample to image and then volume render, however to do this with a large data set needs lots of ram. My suggestion is to clip your data down to a subset then sort out your colouring and opacity. Then apply that to your data set to get the image that you want, using a python script to do it will be better.

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