[vox-tech] Advice comparing filesystems and...?

[Mark A. Craig]

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