What's better/faster? MySql or FileSystem?

Question

Let's imagine a web site that is a directory of people. For each person there may be a profile photo and a biography.

I'll admit my SQL queries could be better but in general what would be faster and use less processing power.

To check if a file exists and then open it or

check against MySql to see if a bio exists and display it.

I'm pretty sure in the above case the filesystem will smoke the mysql database.

What if I make the database a read only delimited txt file?

What's faster in this case?

Is there a certain point where if the txt file has too many records it's better to use MySql?