What is the Best Method to Store 100s of Thousands of Files in SharePoint 2010?

Question

My question is:

What is the best method for storing thousands of files (or millions) in SharePoint?

Every file's size is about: 5 MB * 1000000 = 5 TB

I need the best method for that that does not affect the performance of SharePoint Portal please, with whether or not that's possible.

Thanks

Answer 1

It depends!

SharePoint can easily handle that amount of data and that amount of files. But there is no "magic recipie" that you just apply to SharePoint and then upload all that data. You need to think of how these documents are going to be used (read/write scenarios), you should organize them in Site Collections and sites (and with that split out databases, unless you have the required IOPS). You need to think of how these documents are accessed; browsing, searching etc.

As you can see, there are a lot of options for you to take into consideration. Start with reading the SharePoint software boundaries/limits documentation: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787.aspx. Using that information you can design one first draft of information architecture.

Once you got all the basic details sorted out, please come back with further and more specific questions.

Answer 2

One suggestion - will all those documents actually be using some of the features of SharePoint? I.e. will you be capturing metadata, using document lifecycle, workflows, versioning, etc.? If not, it might be easier to leave them on a file share somewhere. You can still expose them through SharePoint using search. That way they'd be indexed still, but otherwise it's pretty low effort.