how to pre-create directories on linux for file storage

looking for a way to pre-create directories on linux to be used to store a large number of files.

We will be generating file ids using a GUID - I need to keep a copy of these files on a linux web server. I plan on using subdirectories to split up the files (it's ext3)... so for example, the filename 055c102b-62fb-4671-a3c7-68b9515ec53e.swf would live in /data/files/0/5/5/055c102b-62fb-4671-a3c7-68b9515ec53e.swf (taking the first 3 characters as directory names)

My question is - how to create the /data/files/?/?/?/ directories ahead of time? Where ? could be a-z or 0-9

Using Bash I think it is:

mkdir -p {{a..f},{0..9}}/{{a..f},{0..9}}/{{a..f},{0..9}}

Might make more sense to just to create them as needed though.

I think since it is hex, this gives 16^x directories for x = tree depth, but someone from stackoverflow can probably explain that better and/or confirm if that is accurate.