Most operating systems include multiple options for the filesystem to store information onto disk. Choosing between these options can be difficult, because it normally involves some tricky speed versus reliability trade-offs. Similarly, how to set up your database and spread its components across many available disks also has trade-offs, with speed, reliability, and available disk space all linked. PostgreSQL has some facilities to split its database information over multiple disks, but the optimal way to do that is very much application dependent.
In this chapter we will cover the following topics:
- Maximum filesystem sizes
- Filesystem crash recovery
- Linux filesystems
- Solaris and FreeBSD filesystems
- Disk layout for PostgreSQL