Question: Who displays > 200 rows of anything? Isn't this why paging was invented? If you are exporting this information to pdf, xls, csv -- doing it in chunks is most likely safer and less intensive on the server. I'm going to assume the database server has better ways of extracting the data and parsing it than you do. If not, contact said database and get a job there.
As for starting with 2 arrays and parsing them, I have no idea but starting with 2 sounds faster than having a huge one and breaking it in to 2.