If the content is going to be largely static then there is no reason why static files could not be used, except as noted above it makes them difficult to search.

There is an interesting article, http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2004/02/19/plucene.html, which might give you a few ideas regarding the searching.

As for access times I imagine that if the user accesses one article at a time then file access would be quicker, as the server could send out preprepared files, and could use a 404 handler to generate the files if they do not exist.

Chances are that you will need a database at some point for user preferences or similar so in a way you might as well just stick the data in there from the start.