I've just got my first unraid box up and running and am in the process of pre-clearing and generally juggling some data to make the transfer of my media easier.

 

I'm just wondering about the folder structure that I should use for my MP3 collection. I currently have my music organized by genre - but some genres have thousands of releases - the biggest having 15000. My windows machine has a couple of seconds delay when I browse this folder on an external HD, but I'm concerned that the delay might be significantly longer on unraid.

 

Might I be wise to further split the genres into genre\artist-name or similar?

 

Thanks

Should be fine... google is your friend: "reiserfs directory limit", found a couple places that say it can handle 100,000's of thousands (not sure that true, but either way appears it can handle well over the ext3 limit of 32,000).

 

I suppose I'm more concerned about 'real world' performance rather than the technical upper limit. I find browsing large directories on my NTFS external drives quite tedious, but is unraid (accessed over a network) any faster/slower?

 

I have a feeling it will be slower - unless there is some sort of directory cacheing superior to what/any that happens on a windows system.

If you're worried about browsing speed you may want to investigate cache_dirs.  It should help out.