NTFS

Microsoft's flagship filesystem is NTFS. This filesystem uses non-ordered metadata journaling, similar to the writeback journal mode on Linux. This is generally reliable, but on rare occasions you might run into a volume that cannot be mounted in Windows without running the old chkdsk utility in a special mode as part of booting the system.

As described earlier, PostgreSQL installations on Windows using NTFS should prefer to set the following in the database configuration:

open_datasync=fsync_writethrough

This configures the filesystem to flush its WAL writes through any volatile disk write caches.

It's possible to create the functional equivalent of a symbolic link on NTFS called a filesystem junction. The Junction utility available from http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals allows creating these. This lets NTFS volumes on Windows to relocate the pg_xlog or other parts of the database tree to another filesystem, and to use tablespaces too.

Theoretically you...