> >
>
> Lets see, disk inode is 128 bytes, so a 160Gb drive would have
> 160Gb/4k = 40M inodes, taking 5Gb of disk, at 20Mbyte/s this
> would take 250secs.

but wasting 5GB does not make sense.

will you ever use at least 10% of them (4 MILIONS of files)?!


using -i 16384 or -i 32768 make more sense

> I would have thought that the directory reads and extension
> blocks would take longer - since they are not contiguous
> reads.

yes.