Are these issues really unique to Ext3?

See http://www.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/iron-sosp05.pdf for a good paper on how hard disks fail, including partial failures, and the failure/recovery behaviour of ext3, reiserfs, JFS and NTFS. Also talks about ixt3, an ext3 variant by the authors that's intended to have a stronger and more consistent failure/recovery model. This includes journal and data block checksums.

There was a 'journal checksum patch' for ext3 by the authors, I think, but I can't track it down.

Not sure about NTFS, but HFS+ does seem to have journal checksums - see http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/technotes/tn/tn115...