I'm trying to understand the speed issues when using one command versus the other, and if there is any better way to speed up this process. Here is my situation. 
 
I have a file with 300+groups and 12 channels.  Rather than loading all the data and removing unwanted groups/channels, my current script uses DataFileLoadSel to get the appropriate channel of data I want from each group. When all the data is loaded the data portal shows all the groups with 1 channel of data in each  which I then post process. 
 
The data file is custom .csv file where I wrote a plugin appropriate convert the raw data into the groups and channels that I want. The plugin indexes the file properly and there are no issues with it. I also wrote a seperate utility to convert the raw data to TDM format which I can then import as above. 
 
When I DataFileLoadSel a channel from the .csv file it takes ~5 secs per channel to load, so it takes nearly 30 min to complete. If I use the TDM version it takes 1 sec per channel