Linux and Unix in general seems to love huge writeback caching, which is great for speed but horrible for consistency and reliability to power failure and such; on the other hand, Windows flushes the caches more often, providing greater reliability but without as much speed.

That's been my experience, in any case; doing lots of small file operations barely causes any disk activity in Linux, but far more in Windows. Moreover, abruptly cutting power in the middle of that would likely result in far more writes lost on Linux than on Windows.