HydraH wrote:
Yes of course I could do that, all I want to know is if there is any need to do so. What would be better for the hd, hundreds of small files or one large file?
The hard disk itself, couldn't care less; as far as the OS is concerned, well, depends on the OS - Mac OS X, for example, would automatically defrag files under a certain size threshold. The best thing to do is to make sure that the allocation unit size is as large as possible given the average size of the file.
Also, with regard to compression and using other containers - think what is easier to salvage - unobfuscated jpeg files or containers with jpeg files, or, god forbid (and I am not a religious person!), compressed data that doesn't look like a jpeg at all?