I'm not able to reproduce it using your reproduction receipe using e2fsprogs 1.43.4. I suspect you might be hitting a bug which was fixed by this commit: commit d6cad379eb6c86ca58bf5b83a586577de412a2e6 Author: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx> Date: Sun Sep 11 00:25:48 2016 -0400 libext2fs: fix unaligned, multiblock writes in the unix_io handler The read-modify-write code for the unaligned fallback code wasn't working for multi-block writes. This was unmasked by FreeBSD 11-rc2, since its malloc() is returning unaligned memory regions for large memory regions. Signed-off-by: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx> Can you retry with e2fsprogs 1.43.4 and see if it fixes your issue? - Ted