Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Product Documentation > Protocols > PowerScale: Home Directory Storage Solutions for NFS and SMB Environments > Best practices recommendation for file-pool management
This section contains Dell Technologies’ overall best practices recommendations for planning and managing file pools for optimal home directory performance on a PowerScale storage cluster.
End users whose home directories take a long time to load in a GUI-based file manager (Windows Explorer, for example), due to a large number of objects—directories, files, or both—should see significantly improved performance by enabling metadata acceleration on home-directory data.
Most home-directory data should see improved read and write performance by setting the data-access pattern to Streaming, rather than the default setting of Concurrent.