Opinions on NetCDF vs HDF5 for storing scientific data?

Question

Anyone out there have enough experience w/ NetCDF and HDF5 to give some pluses / minuses about them as a way of storing scientific data?

I\'ve used HDF5 and would like

Answer 1

I'll have to admit using HDF5 is very much easier in the long run. It's not hard to get simple data structures into NetCDF format, but manipulating them down the road is kind of a pain.

The "H" in HDF5 stands for "heirarchical", which translated (for me anyway) into a REALLY easy way to manipulate data, by just moving nodes around and referencing nodes from other places.

Can I ask what kind of project this is? I use these both for a lot of HPC scientific modeling tasks. Can I assume you're doing the same? If so, the trend I'm seeing is people moving to HDF5, but that might be different in your particular domain.

However you end up going, best of luck!