ZFS

Few filesystems have ever inspired the sort of zealous advocacy fans of ZFS regularly display. While it has its weak points, in many respects ZFS is a reinvention of the filesystem concept with significant advantages. One thing that's different about ZFS is that it combines filesystem and RAID capabilities into an integrated pair. The RAID-Z implementation in ZFS is a worthwhile alternative to standard RAID5 and RAID6 installations.

ZFS defaults to working in records of 128 KB in size. This is much larger than a PostgreSQL block, which can cause a variety of inefficiencies if your system is regularly reading or writing only small portions of the database at a time (like many OLTP systems do). It's only really appropriate if you prefer to optimize your system for large operations. The default might be fine if you're running a data warehouse that is constantly scanning large chunks of tables. But standard practice for ZFS database installations that do more scattered...