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File listings with several thousands of files load noticeably faster on ISO9660 than on UDF.

If you want to write many small files a disc, you might want to use ISO9660 only. UDF is of course needed for files above 4 GiB (if your authoring software doesn't support ISO9660 multi-part files) and if you need to support file names over 64 characters on Windows (Joliet limitation), given that Rock Ridge is recognized by Linux (and some other Unix-like systems) only.

(For clarity: Joliet and Rock Ridge are extensions to ISO9660, not standalone file systems.)

Of course, disc-at-once written UDF still loads more than 10 times faster than packet-written UDF from Windows, given that the entire file list is in one place, not scattered around the disc.

Just wanted to share it in case anyone finds it useful.

"Thousands of files in a single directory" is always a problem, for any file system . . . If possible, break the files into subdirectories by portions of their name. You will be very glad you did.

1 members found this post helpful.

Could you elaborate?

I deal with several thousand files in one directory regularly. Besides occasional slow loading due to file managers trying to read the signature of many files, I didn't face other issues I can think of.

On the local drive, ext4 handles even tens of thousands of files as smooth as silk. But it seems FAT32 and NTFS are slower with thousands of files. exFAT is somewhere inbetween, but closer to ext4. This is just from my feeling; I haven't done tests with exact timing yet.

For disc-at-once UDF and ISO9660 it doesn't matter because it has to be written once only.

If you are dealing with files like a bunch of musics, I will forgive you. But one thousand or so is the maximum I will want to deal with.

Moreover, it not only bother the heck out of a pc to process this headache for you, but a pain in the ass if you are to do search within those files, well, if you need to find one or more of them.

We are humans, and humans need folders to store their junk. Use them well.

as an example git stores (and not only git) its internal data in several subdirs, not in bulk.

@ exerceo :

Your comparisons in post #3 make perfect sense.

In terms of capabilities:
FAT > exFAT > NTFS

ext2 > ext3 > ext4

NTFS was released in 1993 , as was ext2(!). iirc, ext2 was at least as good as NTFS, possibly better ...

There are in-depth articles on all of these filesystems in wikipedia if you really want to know the details.