47,900 MP3's - How To Organize Hard Discs?

[Juarez]

On what OS ? For Unix filesystems, the bigger the filesystem the
farther away a directory entry will be from the inode on
average. That's no good.

Directory fragmentation will slow things down, as Arno pointed
out. On the other hand, if you create subdirectories to fight
that, fewer directories will be fragmented but there will be
more of them so the total seek time may actually increase.

There are good reasons for avoiding directories with large
number of entries, though (CPU).

Yea, I used to put all my mp3's in one folder but doing that made opening
the folder take a long time so now I sub categorize the folders to cut
down on the amount of files in one folder. With a good media player like
MediaMonkey it doesn't matter as it sees all the files in sub folders and
has it's own categories to sort by.

 

[Rod Speed]

If I'm not mistaken the OP has not been complaining about file I/O.

Irrelevant to YOUR claims about fragmentation.

Unless your disk drive has zero seek time, it has.

Doesnt need zero seek time, file fragmentation has no effect on listing directorys.

I assume the OP is scanning all (or a significant portion of) the tree.

Bad assumption.

Otherwise it wouldn't be slow enough to notice.

Irrelevant to your claim about 'scanning the tree still means stating nearly 50,000 files'

$ time find / | head -n 50000 | wc -l
50000

real 0m7.794s
user 0m0.169s
sys 0m0.291s
$ time find / | head -n 50000 | wc -l
50000

real 0m0.301s
user 0m0.134s
sys 0m0.166s

Works for me, on Ext3 at least.

You dont even know that he's using that.

In the OP's situation ? How ?

If its being done manually, you have to fart around keeping
track of what is in each partition. You're unlikely to be able
to have something logical like say one partition per artist etc.

That's Windows for you. :->

It aint just windows.