The key with new-file-storage is that it will store the file where files should be stored - in the host operating system's file system, rather than the RDBMS. This is why it's so much faster.
The BLOB hack is CPU intensive, as it encodes/decodes the binary data in order to stuff it into Postgres. This expands the size of the data by 4/3. Also, in order to avoid tying up the connection the BLOB is spooled to a file before it is returned to the user. aD has removed this from the Oracle driver, presumably because of the additional overhead - file storage ain't blindingly fast in the Oracle world, either. If I thought we'd be stuck with my BLOB hack much longer I'd remove it from the PG driver, too (PG 7.1 will have reasonable large objects, and of course we won't use them anymore for file storage anyway).
