I just can't understand what is happening, it makes no sense to
me that
one file system would be almost perfect and three would fail so
dramatically. I am going to re-run the tests on all 4 file systems to
verify that it is repeatable.
this is expected behavior; by default ext3 has a journaling mode that is
more safe than defaults of other filesystems, eg when you create a new
file or extend an existing one, it will not commit the new size to disk
before the data has been sent to the disk. Other journaling filesystems
do this entirely asynchronous.
The cost is raw performance, which is why ext3 has a mount option to
emulate the behavior of the other journaling filesystems in both speed
and, ehm, data security.
Your investigation proves that we default to the right mode ;)