elmer said:rhm said:*snip*Yes, because of the way the MFT works, max files per volume and max files per folder are the same thing, and how you organise them should make little or no difference to performance of NTFS.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc781134(WS.10).aspx">http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc781134(WS.10).aspx
To a file server handling requests, it's probably much of a muchness... but, of course, Windows Explorer viewing a folder with 2^32 files, might a different matter
Large volumes and/or folders can suffer from mft/folder/file fragmentation, and so I find that it's often good practice to archive rarely used files to separate volumes, rather than mixing rarely acessed files with frequently accessed files... unless you want to use an automated defrag ultility.
I'm not sure about XP and earlier (don't recall offhand, and I'm too lazy to go boot XP), but Vista and Win7 will automagically run scheduled defrags in the background. IIRC, one caveat is that you can't defrag the MFT when the volume is in use, it has to be done at boot time (similar to a disk check/repair).
