Yeah HDF5 resulted in some amazing speedups for some things I was doing with decently large data sets. It's very practical for standard use cases. The authors

Yeah HDF5 resulted in some amazing speedups for some things I was doing with decently large data sets. It's very practical for standard use cases. The authors are really using and abusing HDF5 and based on some of the tricks they were using to eek out extra performance by going off reservation so to speak, I'm not surprised they ran into data corruption issues. That's an issue I've never had with HDF5.