External HDD: files vs folders

What an odd question, just sort everything as you want so it’s easy for you to find and access. From the « computer’s point of view » it doesn’t matter.

It doesn't matter.

I don't know the answer, but I do know I have a folder full of backup program installation files and it takes a very long time to open compared to any other folder. Opening the previous folder that contains this folder does not take long. So certain files can cause more stress on the drive and storing them all in one folder will probably cause more wear every time you open that large folder.

I know this isn't what you are asking, but I would suggest organizing all the files and folders in the most convenient way possible for you to access them and then just backing everything up on another drive. I don't know what a 500GB drive would cost in your country, but in the US we can get them for $25 with free shipping.

I don't think it makes much of a difference...

I have some experience storing a large number of music files and video, and there are a few things I did to reduce disk churn when opening a big folder of those, assuming you are using Windows:

• Switch the view to Small Icon or List mode to prevent thumbnail generation.
• If you need Detail view to organize your file, but you don't need to know information about the music or video (sometimes, the name is enough), then remove those columns, especially Length or Artist, since those information requires reading from the file.
• If you don't need video preview, turn off thumbnail generation completely. This will reduce disk churn when you select a folder or file, and you can change the view to bigger icons.
• It's a good idea to organize the files into folder, so that you can navigate through them easily, and reduce load when opening a folder. When a folder stores too many files, the metadata of the files could be split into different blocks and takes more time to load.

I don't think any of these tips will help with the durability of HDD. These only reduce unnecessary load and speed up access a bit.

Anyway, if you truly care about your data, you should back them up.

Buy another HDD and make a clone or backup.

It does not matter. The folder structure is just a small file in itself to make it easier for a human to categorise the files. If you can find your way among that large blob of a file list, then it makes zero difference for the HDD. If you want to help to preserve it, defrag it once in a while. Although with a media drive like that, it is sometimes faster to just move all files to your computer, then move them back again. This ensures that the files are written in order. (For the most part.)

My dude, your hard drive is what Cinderella gets to sort by her stepmother in the 2.0 version of this fairy tale.

bump and tbh how can you have everything in root like wtf, so messy hahaha jk
I like things in order, so even if I have a single file I would still make a folder for it, maybe in the future that lonely file will get a friend lol

I prefer some structure after genre in folders. yes, path shouldnt be too long but
series/running/got/s6/.mp4 is not that long

just defrag the hdd from time to time if you constantly add new material. i would recommend jkdefrag or ultradefrag for that. both freeware+portable

As others said it does not matter.

I only hook up my externals when i need them, don't keep them running if you don't need anything from it and always safely unhook them through windows before removing the usb cable.

Each folder uses 1K of disk space (or 4K if you have a lot of permissions and attributes set). So if you make 1,000 folders it'll use between 1M and 4M. So there's no real gain in not using folders or to put more direct: Use folders for your own sanity and saving time ;)

I'm kinda impressed that you can actually find something without any kind of separation, not even between movies and music.

Bump!

вuмp 🚃

Bump

i have no idea how to answer your question,
but have a bump

^^

It doesn't matter. Data is data. The folder is just pointing to the data. It doesn't matter. root, 1 folder, 100 folders. HDD can fail 3 days, 3 weeks, 3 months, 3 years, 30 years (unlikely)

Just anything that is SUPER inportant either back up in another HDD or put it on a cloud storage somewhere, or two.

From a technological standpoint, assuming you're using modern filesystems and operating systems, it doesn't really matter.

As a matter of personal preference, I like to organize things. I do not ever want files in the root directory, it should only contain folders and subfolders and so on. For example I might have a folder called Music, and within that a folder for each artist, and within the artist folder a folder for each album, and within the album folders a folder for each file type (bin/cue, mp3, flac, wav, whatever) along with any metadata such as scans of the CD covers or anything like that. In addition, for music I'll ensure all files are properly named and tagged, so music player software can properly scan my library and make it easy to browse and search them.

Files don't really become corrupted by use. Hard drives will all eventually fail, though, and portable drives tend to use lower-grade disks, so I highly recommend considering a backup plan if the data is important to you. Either buy another drive and copy one onto the other from time to time, or depending on your internet connection you might use a cloud backup service.

I lost all of my computers and data in a flood, including my backups... only thing that survived was one partial backup I made. It was a year old, and was only a backup of my PC operating system and some personal data like passwords and emails (I lost all music/movies/pictures/games/etc), but let me tell you even a year old incomplete data was better than nothing!

Depends, if the folder contains very much files, it takes longer to list them. And if there are let´s say a million files in the folder, it a lot more time.
Personally I sort my files on my external HD in music (subdirectory for each album), video (all in one directory, except series), rest subfolders.
And beware of the file system limit ;) (NTFS: 4,294,967,295 files, but FAT32 just 65,535 per directory).
And as mentioned above: Backups! I´ve seen several HDDs die, not in my PC, but in several servers I have to take care of...

Bump!

it doesn't matter, but as others have said: backup your important data ☢️