This package provides a high-level R interface to CoreArray Genomic Data Structure (GDS) data files, which are portable across platforms with hierarchical structure to store multiple scalable array-oriented data sets with metadata information. It is suited for large-scale datasets, especially for data which are much larger than the available random-access memory. The gdsfmt package offers efficient operations specifically designed for integers of less than 8 bits, since a diploid genotype, like single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), usually occupies fewer bits than a byte. Data compression and decompression are available with relatively efficient random access. It is also allowed to read a GDS file in parallel with multiple R processes supported by the package parallel.