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    You did notice that the NTFS performance article you quote from applies to NT 3.5, released 1994, right? Commented Nov 1, 2015 at 16:03
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    @AvnerShahar-Kashtan yep. Git was released in 2005. I know what I was using NTFS v1.2 based file systems in a corporate environment well into the early 2000s (at a tech company nonetheless). There is certainly overlap between the requirements of git and the file systems on commonly available systems at the time. Commented Nov 1, 2015 at 16:11
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    Perhaps it would be clearer if you stated that this might be a historical artifact of the state of technology when git was introduced, because as it stands, for a question asked in 2015, quoting a twenty year old technical limitation (taking up hald the answer) seems confusing. Commented Nov 1, 2015 at 16:33
  • To be fair, git's "pack" system mitigates a lot of these issues. Theoretically, git could be using only a single directory, and just repacking when the number of files in that directory exceeded a certain (possibly FS-dependent) limit. Commented Nov 1, 2015 at 17:37
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    @AvnerShahar-Kashtan if you read the linked SO article you can see that dealing with directories containing a large number of files is problematic on multiple file systems and operating systems, not just NT 3.5. File limits aside, even just listing the files can incur a large amount of overhead. Commented Nov 1, 2015 at 18:37