stable filesystem

Can anyone comment (anecdotal will do) on the most stable filesystem for USB backup disks? I just had a server stop (no keyboard, no ping, etc) because I attached a usb disk with an ext3 fs that had gone bad. The event log was being hit so hard with messages that it couldn't do anything else. Unplugging the disk made the server responsive again, but obviously this isn't the behaviour I was expecting. A FS with better quality kernel code (eg rate limiting in kernel logging would be a good start!) would be preferable to something that might perform a few % better. I've gone with xfs for now but changing is easy enough. (The disk itself could be bad, but a SMART selftest doesn't indicate that this is the case.) Thanks James