email: sra@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Visit our download page for pre-built binaries.
Please check the CHANGES.md file for change history.
The SRA Toolkit and SDK from NCBI is a collection of tools and libraries for using data in the INSDC Sequence Read Archives.
With release 2.10.0 of sra-tools we have added cloud-native operation for AWS and GCP environments (Linux only for this release), for use with the public SRA. prefetch is capable of retrieving original submission files in addition to ETL data.
With release 2.9.1 of sra-tools we have finally made available the tool fasterq-dump, a replacement for the much older fastq-dump tool. As its name implies, it runs faster, and is better suited for large-scale conversion of SRA objects into FASTQ files that are common on sites with enough disk space for temporary files. fasterq-dump is multi-threaded and performs bulk joins in a way that improves performance as compared to fastq-dump, which performs joins on a per-record basis (and is single-threaded).
fastq-dump is still supported as it handles more corner cases than fasterq-dump, but it is likely to be deprecated in the future.
You can get more information about fasterq-dump in our Wiki at https://github.com/ncbi/sra-tools/wiki/HowTo:-fasterq-dump.
For additional information on using, configuring, and building the toolkit, please visit our wiki or our web site at NCBI
SRA Toolkit Development Team