[R-sig-Geo] how to read in R a big raster of about 6 Gb

[Massimo Bressan]

hi all


I need to perform a zonal statistics by overlapping a DEM raster (ESRI
grid binary) with some polygons (ESRI polygons);

the problem is that I first of all need to read the raster, which is
quite big: about 6 Gbyte;

I know about the function readGDAL() by the fantastic package "rgdal"
which is usually working very well with smaller size files but this time
I got completely stuck (the pc freezes invariably)

do you have any advice on how to deal with such a problem (big file)?

thank you

regards