I'm considering buying a Buffalo Terastation, which is an NAS, network attached storage device. While having 750GB and RAID 5 ability are two of the reasons, there's another.
I have a directory structure containing thousands of sub-directories. The number of files in most of those directories is pretty small, but some have thousands of files. (I don't think the number of files is the issue though, it's the number of directories.) Right now it's located in an NTFS partition on a local drive. If I try to open an extended Explorer view (with the folder-view pane) of that hierarchy in Windows 2000, it takes MINUTES - five to ten - to build that in memory and let me access it; that's on a 1.8GHz AMD system with 1GB of dual DDR RAM. I'm thinking/wondering/hoping that moving that structure onto a Terastation, which uses Linux and an xfs filesystem, might reduce that delay considerably. The fact that one is local attached storage and one is network attached must introduce a few variables, too, but I'm not sure how significant. What do you think? Can you recommend some filesystem comparisons that might help me answer this specific question? Having to wait five minutes every separate time I want to access that directory structure is pretty nightmarish. (Don't needle me about switching to Linux! I'm not yet ready to switch to Linux on the desktop, though I have a BootIt NG multi-boot system installed and three distros of Linux to install and try: Mepis, Ubuntu, and Linspire. I'll get there eventually, I think. My software dependence continues to be the major hesitation.) Mark Craig _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
