>There's C code to do this in squid, and backuppc does it in perl (for a pool directory where all identical files are hardlinked). Unfortunately I have to write the file with some predefined format, so these would not provide the flexibility I need. >Rethink how you're writing files or you'll be in a world of hurt. It's possible that I will be able to name the directory tree based in the hash of te file, so I would get the structure described in one of my previous post (4 directory levels, each directory name would be a single character from 0-9 and A-F, and 65536 (16^4) leaves, each leave containing 200 files). Do you think that this would really improve performance? Could this structure be improved? >BTW, you can pretty much say goodbye to any backup solution for this type of project as well. They'll all die dealing with a file system structure like this. We don't plan to use backups (if the data gets corrupted, we can retrieve it again), but thanks for teh advice. >I think entry level list pricing starts at about $80-100k for 1 NAS gateway (no disks). That's far above the budget... >depending on the total size of this cache files, as it was suggested by nate - throw some hardware at it. Same that above, seems they don't want to spend more in HW (so I have to deal with all performance issues...). Anyway if I can get all the directories to have around 200 files, I think I will be able to make this with the current hardware. Thanks for the advice. _________________________________________________________________ Invite your mail contacts to join your friends list with Windows Live Spaces. It's easy! http://spaces.live.com/spacesapi.aspx?wx_action=create&wx_url=/friends.aspx&mkt=en-us