Hello,

My company currently has a number of different directories for our CAD data scattered across a couple different servers.  We are beginning the discussion of how to reorganize all of this and I would like to know if anyone has seen any big performance issues with collocating tens of thousands of files to one directory.  My IT contact tells me that our servers are pretty burly so on there end many files shouldn't be an issue, so I'd think it would be more of a usability question..  We currently have (split among scads of sub-directories):

• DXF Pool - ~6,500 files
• SW Pool - ~13,000 files
• PDF Pool - ~5,000 files
• Assm pool - ~80,000 files
• CAM pool - ~12,000 files
• Fab pool - ~500 files

Because most of these are coming from Engineering, we are discussing boiling this all down to one "Engineering Data" directory on one server.  This will help us keep track of where everything is supposed to go, and also help with out-of-date revisions because we missed a location.  In theory we are supposed to be getting all of this loaded into SAP to solve these problems, but we were 3 years late going live with SAP, so none of us our confident of getting the data uploaded any time soon.  We've also been pushing for EPDM or PDM Professional for years now and get flatly denied every time we put it in the annual budget.

So my questions are:  Has anyone found a practical limit to how many files can be in one directory before it becomes challenging to work with?  If you have, how many files was that? 

Thanks in advance.