BLOBs vs BYTEA

Hi,

Apologies if I've already sent a post asking this but I'm not sure if it
actually went through last time as it doesn't seem to be in my sent
items box.

Anyway, I was wondering which would be a better way to store a large
amount of files each a few megabytes in size. There could be hundreds of
thousands of files altogether. If stored as BYTEAs this would put them
all in a single table. Would this effect performance considerablely? I
assume if there were thousands then it would. But if the data is stored
as BLOBs then aren't they store inside the database just in another
table? Wouldn't this also be undesirable. Would it be better to store
them normally on the file system and just provide the path and file name
in the database. Obviously this wont provide any security or backup but
would it make sense to do it this way with such a large amount of data?

Thanks.

-Sam