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

Try writing some small sample application in each, and compare the experience. If future scalability of your code to parallel execution (via MPI or the like) is important to you, I know that HDF has a parallel implementation, which people are constantly working to improve. I'm not sure about NetCDF.

Late edit: For NetCDF, there is now Parallel NetCDF from Argonne. It works quite well, and the development team is quite active in improving it further.