[marsdentech]

I used to run a department at a biotech where ~50% of our data came from MinIONs (although, that said, I'm a bioinformatician, rather than a molecular biologist), so I can answer your questions. For (a.), you can for sure "batch" samples. The term of art you're looking for is "multiplexing". Nanopore provide prep kits that allow you to "barcode" different samples (i.e. tag all the molecules in a given sample with a unique, synthetic sequence, which allows them to be distinguished by software downstream), but note that (as with all DNA prep kits, but some more than others) you'll need access to a fair whack of lab equipment and consumables to use it (these kits aren't "all-in"). For (b.), for one anecdata point, I used to process a whole flow cell's data on an M4800 with a 4th Gen i7 and 32 GB of RAM in a few hours. Most of the "high" computational requirements you hear about relate to either assembly or variant calling (both of which are downstream of just retrieving "usable" sequencing data); and even both of those I've managed on that same laptop overnight. Actually acquiring the data (you can delay base calling if you like, although you probably wouldn't need to) is real-time and only needs very modest hardware (IMHO the Nanopore "system requirements" are very much on the "safe-side".) "In the field", your challenge would be physically preparing the samples!