MATLAB: Is save/load write/read soooo slooooow

i/oloadMATLABread writesave speed

I used a save myworkspace at a point when I want to interrupt a long process, and sometime later I do a load myworkspace to restore the interrupt point and continue.
The typical mat file produced by this procedure is 18 GB. The save takes 1200 seconds, the load takes 350 seconds. The times are the same using a single HDD or a SSD cluster in Raid0 configuration.
On the same computer I can use the OS to copy a 18 GB file in 65 seconds on HDD, 30 seconds on SSD.
So it appears that Matlab save/load have some serious bottlenecks. Is there anything I can do differently? Is this something I should raise to Mathworks Support?

Best Answer

Doc says:
    save(filename, ..., version) saves to MAT-files in the specified version:
    '-v4', '-v6', '-v7',or '-v7.3'.
and
    '-v7.3'7.3 (R2006b) or laterVersion 7.0 features plus support for data 
    items greater than or equal to 2 GB on 64-bit systems.
18GB requires v7.3, which is slow. v6 is significantly faster. v6 might be an alternative if you can split the data into <2GB chunks.
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