Not recently, no. I do know that a journaled filesystem can exacerbate this sort of problem as it can make extra work. For example: http://lwn.net/Articles/328363/
In a few cases in the past when dealing with unimportant data I have downgraded to ext2 for a nice performance bump.
In a few cases in the past when dealing with unimportant data I have downgraded to ext2 for a nice performance bump.