Table I Average read/write times and space requirements for 10⁶ (m/z, abundance) pairs for the mz5, mzML, and mzXML file formats

The rows correspond to the linear read time (t_lr), the write time (t_w), the mz5 read time − corrected write time (t_w − t_lr^mz5) and the space requirements. All of the timing values are in seconds or MB/10⁶ data points, respectively. Columns 4 and 5 show that mz5 outperforms the mzML and mzXML formats in all respects.