Firstly, I would be considered very new to linux and am dual booting Yoper RC3 with windows xp pro on an AMD 900Mhz, 256DDR system.

My question concerns a folder I have which stores 3888 mp3s (at the moment), and is 23 gigs in size. There are no subfolders; all the mp3's were ripped off of cds using cdex, and are titled by artist,album,track#,track title. Because of this I like them all within one folder. I have two copies of said folder on two different hard drives: one is reiserfs, the other is ntfs. These are dedicated drives - my operating systems are on a different disk. From windows xp, I can access this folder's contents in less then one second. From Yoper, however it takes well over a minute to load the folder from the ntfs drive, and almost two minutes to load it off the reiserfs drive (i was very confused by the reiserfs drive being slower to load after i copied the files over to it from ntfs???)

My question finally, is this: Is there any filesystem/file manager or anything that will get the contents of this folder loaded within seconds?? I figure if windoze can handle it, surely there is a way in linux. I'm attempting to finally make the switch, but having the music collection rapidly on hand is mission critical for me.

I'm not sure what Yoper uses as it's default filemanager/desktop environment. However, I am guessing it's something slow and bulky. First thing to do is try something faster. I LOVE one called gentoo:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/gentoo/?topic_id=860

Second, how is the drive mounted? This may be part of the slowdown process. IF the drive is getting mounted as the filemanager is getting pulled up, then there may be delay there. Please post your /etc/fstab file so we can see how that's getting mounted. If you are selectively mounting it every time with the mount command, that's fine. But you will lose some time simply from doing that. You maybe want to have it mounted at startup.

Also, I am a bit confused. You've got a dedicated HD with ReiserFS that has IDENTICAL files as a dedicated HD with NTFS? Is this simply so win can read it? Anyway, I am wondering which one you are trying to mount, and maybe for some clarification on this.

Cool