About reading and writing to files

[Bingrui Foo]

Hi,

I'm wondering in freeBSD, if I have a directory with 10,000 files, or
maybe even 100,000 files, each about 5 kb long. Wondering will reading and
writing to any one of these files in C be affected by the sheer number of
these files? Will the access time be affected significantly?

Just wondering because not sure whether I should put these data in a
database or just use files with unique names.

Also will separating the files into many directories help?

Thanks.
Foo