I used to really like XFS for speed. Nothing could beat it in streaming, and random access was pretty good too. I ended up putting all my Oracle tablespaces on it, and then start using it for random other stuff.

And then I got multiple corrupt partitions. I'm sure this was hardware. But the recovery (or failed attempt in some cases) of XFS partitions seemed far more painful than ext3. I ended up moving away from it.

As I get older, it seems I prefer comfort over speed. In many areas of my life.