I'm having trouble seaching for info on ext3 at riocar.org because it is too short of a term to search for (?).

Yeah, that was one draback of the search-system upgrade. Search terms must be more than four characters now. They're going to work around that if they can. But hey, we get fuzzy searches on the FAQ now!

Anyway, even if you could search on that term, you wouldn't find it in the FAQ. I've left it out because I don't want to popularize it at the moment. Converting to EXT3 isn't something you should do unless you really know what you're doing. You could get yourself into trouble. If, post-2.0, the empeg's default software supports that type of file system, then it will all be made transparent to you. But until then, unless you've got a really good reason and you know exactly what you're doing, I would recommend against messing with EXT3.