http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/388
http://linuxgazette.net/122/TWDT.html#piszcz

Conclusion

With the second round of filesystem benchmarks, I hope everyone is now satisfied with the benchmarks using the 2.6 kernel. What I gleam from these benchmarks is both EXT2 and EXT3 are now roughly the same speeds in the majority of the tests. Personally, I still choose XFS for filesystem performance and scalability.