After a firmware update last December really slowed down NTFS performance, I did numerous tests with pretty much all drive formats(NTFS, EXT3, HFS). It was clear that EXT3 provided the best performance. Since then, NTFS performance has improved, but I think EXT3 is still the fastest. I usually format my drives NTFS and the performance is almost as good as EXT3 and most of my machines are Windows 7, so that makes for easy portablility.