It's really not dumb. MD5 was designed as a cryptographic hash. It's certainly faster than many other cryptographic hashes, and it's also insecure. Many, many

It's really not dumb. MD5 was designed as a cryptographic hash. It's certainly faster than many other cryptographic hashes, and it's also insecure. Many, many hashes that are not designed to be cryptographic are 10x or more faster than md5 (e.g. murmur, siphash, xxhash, and many more). No one thinks security is a component here. Literally everyone in this thread has agreed to that fact. What's actually kinda dumb is to use any cryptographic hash when security is not needed - there's no need to weigh the tradeoffs between md5, sha, blake, etc. Those hashes are universally slow compared to the likes of xxhash - why not just use that to bin the files into subdirectories? Why limit yourself to the slow subset of hashes if you don't need the specific properties that make them slow?