What you describe was common on the SGI systems we used at work. Some setups had a configuration file which was constantly written to and read from, and that file would be (most of the time) empty if there was a power failure (I don't btw know why the SGI systems didn't have a power-failure-emergency-shutdown mode, the power supplies kept power for several seconds. But anyway).
However: This _never_ happened with XFS on Linux systems. Exact same software. I don't know why. But XFS has been incredibly stable for not only my personal boxes but also for everything we have provided to customers at work. We need non-varying sustained write rates for huge amounts of data, and XFS is smooth, much better than when tested against e.g. ext4 (the tests we did were done years ago, we haven't retested as XFS just works.
However: This _never_ happened with XFS on Linux systems. Exact same software. I don't know why. But XFS has been incredibly stable for not only my personal boxes but also for everything we have provided to customers at work. We need non-varying sustained write rates for huge amounts of data, and XFS is smooth, much better than when tested against e.g. ext4 (the tests we did were done years ago, we haven't retested as XFS just works.