Thank you for all the helpfull comments.
To sum up:
- unformatted IO is at least one order of magnitude faster than formatted IO
- unformatted IO is not portable
- some compilers provide options to convert between Big and Little
Endian codings
- for larger projects it might be useful to use the NetCDF library which
provides a
portable and efficient way for storing and accessing large data sets.
The library sources
are freely available at http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/
Joerg
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