Most operating systems (OSes) include multiple options for the filesystem used to store information onto the 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 to spread its components across many available disks also has trade-offs, with speed, reliability, and available disk space all linked. PostgreSQL has some features 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 go through the following topics:
- Maximum filesystem sizes
- Filesystem crash recovery
- Linux filesystems
- Solaris and FreeBSD filesystems
- Disk layout for PostgreSQL