I am managing media for an Organization that has thousands of lectures on different topics and many times same lecture has more than about five topics. I have to manage about 10,000 mp3 files currently and it increases at the rate of 1500 files per year. I saw new feature in win7 that of able to filter the files in a folder (in details view) depending on the id3Tags it has. In the details view the id3 tags like 'Title', 'Genre', 'Artist', etc are shown. There in the ribbon at top displaying the heading-names of these tags - say 'Title' for the title of mp3 file - when one places the cursor then the down arrow appears, clicking which appears a list of values that are presently there in that tag field that belongs to different files in the same folder. Then on checking a particular value all the files with that particular value in that particular tag in the same folder will be shown. This is similar to filtering records in Microsoft Excel. This new feature is of much help for me for managing my media as I can add multiple values in some of the id3tags like composers. Thus I can keep all the files in a single folder and just tag them according to my need. Then I don't need to make complex folder structure to categorize my files in which I will have to keep different copies of my file that has more than on category (as I can't have the same file in two different folders) and when some tag of the file change, I will have to change it in each copy in different folders. Like this so many complications are solved. But I am not very experienced in how an OS works and thus don't know what can be the problems that will be caused by keeping a large volume of files in a single folder and also in the way I am thinking to manage my data. So please answer my query and please give your comments on my way of thinking to manage my mp3 data. Thankyou, Damodara Das. damodara.bvks@gmail.com

Alot of it is based on disk/ raid read times etc.. if we are just throwing out numbers Max files per folder FAT16- 512 FAT32- 65,534 files or folders per folder NTFS- 4,294,967,295 *If you use large numbers of files in an NTFS folder (300,000 or more), disable short-file name generation for better performance, and especially if the first six characters of the long file names are similar.* See also about NTFS http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc781134(WS.10).aspx If your not using a raid setup id look into one.

Yes. Thank you very much for this answer. 1. Can I know how to disable short-filename generation? 2. Do you have anything to comment on the new feature of Win7 file browser which filters files in a folder based on its id3Tags in the details view? Thankyou, Damodara das.Damodara Das

For a sanity check I would, try to break them up into folders, then sort them by topics... D:\Audio Lectures\History\Rise of the Smurf Empire\ D:\Audio Lectures\Biology\Genetics and Gamma Rays D:\Audio Lectures\Engineering\Armor\Building Better Repulser Gloves 101 Or by Course numbers: D:\Audio Lectures\2011\CSI101\CRIM102-- :P Advice offered, If you need more help it is advised to seek the council and advice of paid professionals. The answer is always 42, or reboot.