Local Database for Importing/manipulating ~200gb of data So I've recently come into a huge data set that i'm looking to work with - About 100gb in size across 80 flat files all of which I need to store in a relational way in order to interrogate, work with and actually perform data transformations and statistical analysis on.

I'm by no means a database administrator - I'm more in the statistical analysis space, but have learnt SQL and regularly work with local instances of SQL Server 2012 Express and R Studio. I use SQL Server to perform the manipulations, filtering and data clean up and R Studio to perform the statistical analysis; however historically I've only worked with data up to 10gbs.

During the SQL Express data import process I see that the maximum write speed is about 4mb/s (with my SSD I presumed it would be higher) and it has the storage limitation of ~10gb. Given I'm set up with an SSD, i7 processor and 16gb of ram (which i can upgrade to 64gb of ram if needed), I expected this to be faster. I'm thinking SQL Express is no longer be the ideal platform, but i'm not sure where to next. I'm open to paying for the versions of SQL Server under $1000, but I just don't know if that's what I need.

My question is, given the scale of this data and that I really need to be able to filter, combine and transform huge scales of it, what would be the ideal database I should be using? My preference is that there are suggestions for a windows platform, but I'm open to Linux databases too.
If you are the ONLY user connecting and manipulating data, I would suggest to download SQL Server 2016 DEVELOPER Edition (FREE) since it has tight integration with R.