From an archiving operation I have to handle a directory that contains about 80.000 sub-directories (and INCREASING).
The number cannot be reduced or distributed over a larger number of sub-directories.
Consequently, working in the directory is VERY slow, as it re-reads the directory structure after every action.

Is there any way to speed up access to such a directory (e.g. when accessing with "Explorer" or programs such as "Total Commander") or at least optimize PERFORMANCE ?Not sure I can give you a good answer, but might be worth asking whether your hard drive has recently been defragmented. Has it?

Your OS? How much free space (MBytes and percentage) on your hard drive? Also Total Commander hates indexing service and any Symantec products...
Turn off the indexing service and if you have any Symantec products think about replacing them with (FREE ) alternative protection apps...
There's a ton of info for this in our Virus and Spyware Forum.soybean:
The HDD is brand new, the archiving was the first operation done with it.
It's a 500GB USB HDD, the current utilization is about 30GB.
Each archived file folder (out of the 80.000) contains one or more PDF or DOC FILES with about 375kB in average.

The indexing is switched on at the moment, because of the promised "faster search" results.
Can the indexing be switched of just like that or will it affect the data on the HDD ?
(e.g. re-format or such)

I use the USB HDD with several PCs and Laptops running AV programs, e.g. AVIRA on the PC, but "OfficeScan" on the Laptop.
They are all slow when accessing the archive folder containing the 80.000 sub-directories, so I assume it's not a problem of the AV program.

OS is WinXP Home on PC and WinXP Prof. on Laptop.

When you SWITCH off the indexing service be prepared to wait about the same amount of time as defrag or diskcheck takes...

No guarantees here on it speeding things up but in my experience running Total Commander it liked it off.

Your mileage may vary...so I have switched off the "Indexing Service" on the USB HDD,
et voila, what used to be 1.5 to 2 minutes waiting time until the directory was read,
is now reduced to about 9 seconds.
*censored* of an improvement !

Thanks to you guys, I am one happy user now.
Merry Christmas.

BTW: The time needed to work on the HDD/directories/files to change from "Indexing" to "No index" took about 5 minutes.Excellent !

Enjoy the Holidays yourself as well and stop by anytime ! !