[bombcar]

My personal recollection is that long FSCK times on ever-increasing disk sizes was the driving force; I remember switching to ReiserFS simply because my 160 GB mp3 drive would take forever to FSCK if the computer lost power or had to do a hard reset. I didn't even mind the amusing file corruption you'd get from tail-packing or whatever it was because I needed that speed.

I later manually did the needful to get XFS working as it was faster on deletes, iirc.