Thanks for the responses everyone. Some were more detailed than I really needed but they gave me a lot of insight into how these sorts of things work (and learning something new is always a good thing).
In the end I wrote some test programs and ran them against generated data and the hashes won the speed test hands-down. It seems a little odd to use a hash when all I really have is a huge set of "keys" (I set the values to 1 arbitrarily) but it's clear the hash-key lookup is vastly more efficient than iterating over a huge array. Thanks again. Jeff
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