I have a re-purposed old Dell running 12.04 server. We're mostly using it as a NAS and we have an art department using Mac OS X and most of our other departments using Windows 7 or 8. My problem is this--we have to search and find a lot of files, particularly larger art files, and there is one huge directory in particular that is very slow.

The art department is using a tool called EasyFind to search over the LAN. I doubt that I can train everyone to use locate in their terminal but doing a search in the browser is not a bad possibility if any exists.

Any words of wisdom of how to help speed up this janky machine?