So many questions, so little brains..
 

(Knoppix 5.1 on Compaq Laptop)

After doing some reading, I chose reiser for my file-system. This seems to make the drive rather chatty. I attribute this to the constant recording of transactions, but is this really my imagination? And is a journaling system really beneficial for the above application?

I'll have many more questions, and if I could offer a beer in return...

Thanks.

Most likely the culprit is an active process. Most general desktop users will not encounter noticeable differences in the more popular journaling file systems. There are a lot of benchmarks available on the web if you are really interested in churning up some more info.

ReiserFS is supposed to be one of the faster filesystems available, although I'm a bigger fan of XFS...
If you haven't already, you could try adding "noatime" as an option to the fstab entry.
Unless you're in dire need of access time logging...

There are more optimizations you can do, but you might have to google it (unless someone replies here).
Some reading on journaling filesystems: http://www.linux-mag.com/id/1180?r=s
You might also get some optimization info from here: http://www.namesys.com/