Unfortunately not had the time to thoroughly read and digest the linked document, but I saw very frequent mention of fragmentation being a large factor. With the proliferation of cheap SSD storage it would be an extremely useful experiment to re-do their testing in a modern environment.
A bit mean to write this off as lunacy I think, thank you for providing the link however, it is of interest to me - I have an application that out of the box has been merrily storing document as blobs. A task I need to get to is determining whether it is worth the upheaval of getting this out of the database and onto the filesystem - luckily all small documents.
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and at the backs of books in libraries."
— Samuel Johnson
I wonder, would the great Samuel Johnson have replaced that with "GIYF" now?