ext3 fs problems

[Jonathan Hutchins]

I had a problem recently where I filled up a couple of partitions on a new
RedHat 7.2 server with the ext3 filesystem.  Now, random files are corrupt
on the partitions, and in one case a bunch of directories seem to have
disappeared.

This reminds me of when I was running a compressed partition with DiskSpace
or whatever it was Microsoft eventually bought for disk compression
(pre-NT).  The compression system used some sort of algorithm to "estimate"
available space, and this was tunable.  However, estimated space was what
was reported to DOS, and if the estimate was greater than available space,
WHAM, corrupt files all over the place as DOS kept writing after space ran
out.

Anybody have any comments or experience with ext3fs?  Is this a shortcoming
in a new filesystem, or am I completely off my rocker and is it clearly a
hardware failure?