When saving thousands or millions of files to a harddisk or external storage device like the NetApp, this needs to be done in a structured way. Otherwise, accessing the files will eventually become very slow because directory listings will become large and take a long to process. In our experience, there is a limit of 10,000 entries per folder that should not be exceeded to prevent this performance degradation. Thus, our depositories (media sets) contain a subdirectory structure to prevent the excess of this limit. While the subdirectory structure solves this problem, it uses several times more filesystem units or inodes (in case of linux based devices like the NetApp) than the files alone would. When saving millions of files into the same media set and with inappropriate settings, this might cause the filesystem to run out of units/inodes although there is still free space available. This and the following information needs to be taken into account when creating and configuring the depositories.
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