I have a 900GB ext4 partition on a hard drive that has no defects and no bad sectors. The partition is completely empty except for an empty lost+found directory. The partition was formated using default parameters except that I set the number of reserved filesystem blocks to 1%.

I downloaded the ~900MB file xubuntu-15.04-desktop-amd64.iso to the directory using wget. When the download was finished, I found that the file was split into four fragments:

filefrag -v /media/emma/red/xubuntu-15.04-desktop-amd64.iso
Filesystem type is: ef53
File size of /media/emma/red/xubuntu-15.04-desktop-amd64.iso is 1009778688 (246528 blocks of 4096 bytes)
 ext:     logical_offset:        physical_offset: length:   expected: flags:
   0:        0..   32767:      34816..     67583:  32768:            
   1:    32768..   63487:      67584..     98303:  30720:            
   2:    63488..   96255:     100352..    133119:  32768:      98304:
   3:    96256..  126975:     133120..    163839:  30720:            
   4:   126976..  159743:     165888..    198655:  32768:     163840:
   5:   159744..  190463:     198656..    229375:  30720:            
   6:   190464..  223231:     231424..    264191:  32768:     229376:
   7:   223232..  246527:     264192..    287487:  23296:             eof
/media/emma/red/xubuntu-15.04-desktop-amd64.iso: 4 extents found

Thinking this might be releated to wget somehow, I removed the ISO file from the partition, making it empty again, then I copied the ~700MB file v1.mp4 to the partition using cp. This file was fragmented too. It was split into three fragments:

filefrag -v /media/emma/red/v1.mp4
Filesystem type is: ef53
File size of /media/emma/red/v1.mp4 is 737904458 (180153 blocks of 4096 bytes)
 ext:     logical_offset:        physical_offset: length:   expected: flags:
   0:        0..   32767:      34816..     67583:  32768:            
   1:    32768..   63487:      67584..     98303:  30720:            
   2:    63488..   96255:     100352..    133119:  32768:      98304:
   3:    96256..  126975:     133120..    163839:  30720:            
   4:   126976..  159743:     165888..    198655:  32768:     163840:
   5:   159744..  180152:     198656..    219064:  20409:             eof
/media/emma/red/v1.mp4: 3 extents found

Why is this happening? I thought ext4 was meant to be resistant to fragmentation. Instead I find that it immediately fragments a solitary file when all the rest of the volume is unused. This seems to be worse than both FAT32 and NTFS.