filesystems - Lots of small files or a couple huge ones? -

In terms of performance and efficiency, it is better to use very few files (by many I mean something equal Million) or a couple (ten or very) huge (many gigabytes) files? Let's just say that I'm building a database (not completely accurate, but all these cases is that it is being delivered to a lot).

I'm concerned primarily with the performance of my file system currently on Linux 3x3 (Ubuntu server version if this is the case), although I am in a situation where I still switch So, the comparison between the different file systems would be great. For technical reasons I can not use a real DBMS (hence the question) for this, so "just use MySQL" is not a good answer.

Thank you in advance, and tell me what I want to be more specific.

---

Edit: I am going to store small pieces of data, so using very few files will be easy. So if I went with using some big files, then I'm only retrieving some of them KB at a time. I am also using an index, so there is really no problem. Besides, some data points to other pieces of data (this will point the file in a case of many small files, and large files In the location of the file's data) There are many assumptions here, but for all intents and purposes, a large file is too small.