Memory usage with raw files vs imported files

Hello,

I’m just wondering what uses up the most virtual memory: applying processes on links to raw files, or applying them on the imported file in the database?

I know importing the raw file into the database takes up a lot of hard disk memory, but I’m being bottle-necked by my 16gb RAM here…so trying to figure out if its better to first import my data into the database as one continuous file (non-epoched) and then compute the source model and compute its Z-score, then what I am doing now which is trying to compute the Z-score on the source model that I computed with my link to raw file.

Thanks for the help! Much appreciated.
Have a nice day