What Limitations Exist With Channel and File Sizes in DIAdem?

Updated Sep 6, 2022

Reported In

Software

  • DIAdem

Issue Details

  • I am planning on analyzing large amounts of data in DIAdem.  Are there any size limitations I should consider?
  • I'm encountering an error stating: 
"Cannot Register the file...with the loader "TDMS"." 
"Cannot copy the bulk data from the ... file into the internal data. Try to load the data."

Solution

While DIAdem does not have a hard limit in terms of file size, the following limitations do exist:
  • DIAdem channels can never contain more than 231-1 values (about 2 billion). By values, this refers to data points and not bytes of data. Note that the channel limitation is not affected by the size of each data point.
  • DIAdem can never have more than 150.000 channels. This limit exists since DIAdem 2019, previous versions have a limit of 216 channels (about 65,000).
When dealing with large data files, it is a good idea to account for the following considerations as well:
  • Though DIAdem can handle data files much larger than 4GB, some DataPlugins can produce unexpected behavior with files this large, especially those written in C++. For this reason, it is a good idea to use the TDM or TDMS file formats whenever possible with large files.
  • When you need to view or analyze only a few parts of a large data file, it is a good idea to use the register data option to open the data file.
    • Right click the desired file and select Register Data. This feature loads all the information about the file (number of channels, their names and all their properties, etc.), but does not load the actual data until you view or analyze it. With this feature, you can load only the data you need from a data file, or quickly see the structure of the file.