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The above info sounds accurate to me based on my own 5 years of experience with a red earied slider that still seems very healthy and active; it has more than doubled in size since we've had it. I now have an Eheim canister filter (2033 I think) on a 20gal tank with about 6 inches depth of water and enough large pebbles (over 1/4" dia) to cover about half the bottom; I have four or five large flat rocks on one end, with a 1" thick piece of tree bark on top of the rocks for turtle sunning/warming under the overhead heating lamp with a 60w bulb. It works and very rarely was the water not perfectly clear. When it did get cloudy, it was because the filter was starting to clog from pieces of tree bark getting into the filter. When the turtle was younger, it didn't seem interested in chewing or tearing the bark apart, but lately the turtle has been tearing up the bark into small pieces which clog the filter. About two weeks ago, I finally removed the piece of bark so now the turtle has to lounge on the rocks and I don't expect the filter to clog again. My turtle has never had live fish yet, only Tetra repto sticks and occasional live worms or flies that my boys catch.
I've also used Eheim filters on my fish tanks and from that my opinion is that they are excellent design and last a very long time (one on my 55gal fishtank has been running over 15 years with no spare parts or breakdowns) and equally important to me, they are so quiet you can barely hear them even putting your ear next to it. I'm sure other canister filters with comparable flow rates would work as well, I just don't know for how long or how noisey.
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