storing large arrays of floats

HI

I have to store an array of 50,000 floats in a postgres database. At
firts I tried to store it as float[], but that take s to much time for
jdbc to convert the data so that it can be stored in the database.
Next I tried to store it as byte[] array in a BYTEA column. This worked
ok, but when I inspect the data at the serverside the datasize increased
with a factor 1,5 to 2 and I see a lot of escape(\0) characters. What I
mean to do is storing the bunch of data and retrieving subselections of
the data with the help of Plperl fucntions. Now I can't restore the data
at serverside. What is the clue? Do I have to store the data with
another function as "preparedstatement.setBytes" or must I use another
columntype.

Thanks
Kees Kling