As I am in the process of creating a 3D c++ game and I was wondering what would be more beneficial when dealing with game assets with regards to storage. I have seen some games have a single asset file compressed with everything in it and other with lots of little compressed files.

If I had lots of individual files I would not need to load a large file at once and use up memory but the code would have to go about file seeking when the level loads to find all the correct files needed.

There is no file seeking needed when dealing with one large file, but again, what about all the assets not currently needed that would get loaded with the one file?

I could also have an asset file for each level, but then how do I deal with shared assets

This has been bothering me for a while so tell me what other advantages and disadvantages are there to either way of doing things.