Vertex Buffer Performance Hit

I am making a simple program that loads a .3ds file and displays it to the screen. Ive got all the loading figured out, now Ive got to render the scene. I want to load each mesh object onto its own vertex and index buffer and then render each mesh object. The problem is that a .3ds file could conatin hundreds of little mesh objects. My question is would hundreds of little vertex & index buffers being rendered at once make a significant performance hit, or should I load all the meshes onto one vertex buffer and render that?? thanks