does directory level have any impact on read/write speeds?

Yupp, even mapping a harddrive to A:\ will make it faster since there's less letters to look through before finding the right one.

>>57593602
really? source?

>>57593566
You need reiserfs

>>57593566

Kernel fag here.

No.

>>57593566
No, that's not how this works.
Any effect positive or negative is placebo, and or within margin of error.

>>57593566
it depends. every directory is a directory block on disk, i.e. an on-disk list of the directory's contents that you have to search through to find the next part of the path. so abstractly you perform more directory block loads and searches on longer paths

however, directory blocks are buffered, i.e. if you already have a block in memory it won't need to go to disk to fetch it again. so if you're walking the directory structure in an organized fashion (all the files in directory A, then all the files in directory B...) the buffering largely amortizes any directory load cost

furthermore, the cost of each search is proportional to the number of entries in the directory, so if you just put all your files in one directory you'd be paying a much larger search cost in that one directory

you'd have to benchmark it to actually find out (and to be honest this is totally stupid and you won't be able to find out anything without some serious microbenchmarking), but i'd actually guess that the deeper directory structure is faster because of the cheaper search cost