.mat files taking a very long time to load

I have a script which needs to work through many large .mat files (all about 17 MB) - one for each day of the years from 2000 to 2019 - and then to do so 120 times for another set of conditions. This takes a very long time if I simply use load() to do so. I have tried converting to .zip files, converting to another version of .mat file (uncompressed with v6 or compressed with v7.3 and using the matfile() function) but to no avail. I have also tried downloading them all once (rather than the 120 times) and saving to a cell array for later access, but the array soon grew too large and matlab crashed.

Is there a faster way to do something like this? Any help would be much appreciated.

[Rik]

You probably can't avoid the slow disk (SSDs are also slow when you compare them to RAM).

The only high-level advice I can give you is to limit the number of times you load the same file as much as you can.

[Cole Tamburri]

Rik, would working with an hdf5 file be faster at all? The mat files are derived from original hdf5 files but I still have the latter on hand.

[Rik]

The mat files might have a slight edge (because they probably require less processing to load). I doubt you will succeed in getting this to work fast. You could possibly get it to run faster, maybe with a RAID setup?

[Cole Tamburri]

Thanks for your help. Looks like I might just have to stick with the way it is currently running and just bear it, but I'll look around.