The story revisited (2012)

The Linux Ext filesystem was definitely improved during the last couple of years.
The sequential write performance was improved a lot. I measure numbers around 2-300MB/s (Linux 2.6.32).

One small note: don't expect to see these numbers on a live system. In a real work environment (under light load) you'll see 30-70MB/sec sequential read and write performance. Random read and write will be even worse.

The original article:

A couple of years ago I've created a Linux-based virtual machine (VM) for Web/software demos that require a server component (web, db, etc.). It was very easy to carry the VM everywhere and demonstrate the results running an entire client-server environment on my laptop.

Based on this experience, I've created a VM for Drupal site and module developers. (There were some similar systems but they were based on different OS distros and/or they seemed to be a bit abandoned.)