I don't know. All that effort, and I'm not even sure the quoted improvement is outside the error of measurement. The author doesn't specify the hardware here either, and the sustained rate of 15MB/s (peak: <35MB/s) seems to me like it's fairly old. His graphs are anything but convincing: need better data.

Really, the best thing you can do to improve your HDD performance is to:

1. Throw out ext3 and replace it with a better file system - consensus seems to be XFS if you have lots of large files, Reiser if you have lots of small ones or JFS for a nice blend. I personally have been using JFS for pretty much everything for a few years.

2. Buy a better hard disk. Good SATA disks are blazing fast these days. Get a Serial Attached SCSI RAID if the lack of speed is costing you money.