> Adding a new file, for example, requires that the filesystem compare the new item name to the name of every other file in the folder to check for conflicts I

> Adding a new file, for example, requires that the filesystem compare the new item name to the name of every other file in the folder to check for conflicts Is this true? I would've assumed that filesystems have smarter ways to find a file in a folder than to do a linear search through every entry. That doesn't take away from this post, those smarter datastructures and algorithms will still grow slower with more entries, just not linearly so.