US Patent 10223377 Efficiently seeding small files with certain localities

According to one embodiment, a request for seeding a predetermined number of small files with a predetermined locality in a storage system is received, each of the files to have a predetermined file size. In response to the request, a plurality of segments and fingerprints of the segments are generated. File trees representing the predetermined number of files respectively are generated based on the fingerprints of the segments, each of the files represented by the segments having the predetermined file size. A namespace representing one or more directories of the files is generated based on the file trees, where each of the directories of files satisfies the predetermined locality. The namespace and segments corresponding to the files of one or more directories are written to a storage device of the storage system.