Comment by JohnBooty

   I believe that with good tuning and allocation 
   heuristics, FAT32 can outperform the far more complex
   filesystems (ext*, NTFS, etc.) widely believed to be
   superior. One idea I've never gotten around to testing
   out is to modify the Linux FAT driver and do some
   benchmarking.

I don't understand. Has anybody ever claimed that the more complex alternatives were actually faster?

NTFS and other filesystems that followed FAT32 are "superior" because they support things like journaling and more robust permissions... things that unavoidably incur (a least) a small performance hit.