Extended Data Fig. 4: FAST5 to SLOW5 data conversion performance.

(a) Dot plot shows the time take to convert a downsampled human genome sequencing dataset of 500,000 reads (see Supplementary Table 1) from FAST5 format to ASCII SLOW5 (purple), binary BLOW5 (orange) and compressed BLOW5-zlib (red) formats as a function of CPU threads used on the HPC-HDD system (see Supplementary Table 2). Parallel file conversion was achieved using a multi-processing approach described in the Methods section. (b) Dot plot shows the time taken to merge the individual files from (a) into a single SLOW5/BLOW5 file. (c) Curves show the progress of data generation (purple) and FAST5 to BLOW5-zlib conversion (orange) during a sequencing run on an ONT PromethION device with live conversion enabled. As evident, all reads are converted within minutes of availability and the entire dataset is converted to BLOW5-zlib format at the sequencing run completion.