NTFS Performance under XP Pro SP3, recommendations for high amount of files?

Question

I was wondering if there are any recommendations or features that one may remove/disable of NTFS under Windows XP Pro SP3 (32bits) - to gain performance while using it as an archive unit for millions of files?

The only requirements for the archiving structure are filenames and their data, while having the ability to store millions of files, with >4GB filesize limitation. No need for any of: access times, modification dates, creation dates, permissions, journal, short filenames. (any of them are optional?)

I thought about creating a structure of huge files which contain pieces of the datas, and their offsets. But even if it had a performance boost - it would limit my ability to delete specific pieces, without re-writing the whole big file.

Thanks in advance, Doori Bar

Answer 1

There are ways to disable the last access time writing, which takes a significant amount of time on XP.

On MSDN : how to disable last access timestamp. This reference is about XP Embedded, it should work also for XP Pro (I know it's feasible).

Answer 2

There is a technet article titled Working with File Systems. Check out the section "Optimizing NTFS Performance".

Answer 3

NTFS was specifically designed and tested for hundreds of thousands of files per directory. Read an article about it many years ago by the designer. No idea where to find it now, sorry.