Opinions on NetCDF vs HDF5 for storing scientific data?

Question

Anyone out there have enough experience w/ NetCDF and HDF5 to give some pluses / minuses about them as a way of storing scientific data?

I\'ve used HDF5 and would like

Answer 1

NetCDF, which translates HDF5 into its own data model, looks and works great... until you find out that NetCDF doesn't support unsigned values! See also my question on how to detect unsigned values in existing HDF5 files using NetCDF.

Update: Actually, it turns out that although NetCDF-3 doesn't support signed values, NetCDF-4 supports signed values, even though the NetCDF API in Java for determining signedness is a little convoluted.