Well, you can always try smaller partitions and/or create a few 25 GB ones and try each one and/or try another drive. :) IIRC, I've done this on 20 - 30 GB partitions in the past without bigger troubles...
I am creating a 25Gb ext2 partition on a new drive in the Milan and it is taking ages and has slowed the machine to a crawl. It has done 93/220 inodes in 12 hours.
I don't remember it being so slow on the previous 8Gb partition.