Wow, I finally managed to finish moving and get some time to do some more work on the ext3 stuff. I managed to get it patched all the way up to the current version of ext3 for kernel 2.2 (0.0.7a). Aside from any bugs I may have introduced this should be pretty stable. Get the latest version here. The instructions are a little simpler for this version as well.

Please try this out and let me know how it works for you. The major advantage is no more of those painfully long drive checks. Regular drive mounts also happen a little faster. I have been running some version of ext3 on my empeg for a couple of months now with no data loss and this newest version seems to fix the one remount bug I was having previously.

If you are running the older version of ext3 that I posted a couple of months ago the upgrade process is pretty simple. Just grab the newer kernel, e2fsck, and tune2fs from the site above and install them. You will also want to upgrade to the newer journal format by mounting the drive once with this command: "mount /dev/hdaX /mnt -o journal=update".

-Mike