Disk controllers
One of the most critical aspects of PostgreSQL performance is also one of the easiest to overlook. Several hardware trends have made the disk controller seem less important now:
- Increasing CPU speeds and improved Direct Memory Access (DMA) approaches make off-loading disk work to a controller card seemingly less valuable. There is little chance that your controller will be any faster at previously expensive tasks such as RAID parity computation than your main system processor(s).
- Recent operating-system's file system technology such as Linux Software RAID and ZFS make hardware RAID, with its often proprietary storage, seem less desirable.
- Virtual machines and cloud deployments make the underlying disk hardware almost completely disconnected from the interface that your operating system sees.
- Faster drives such as SSD seem to eliminate the need for an intermediate intelligent controller.
Do not be fooled however. When it comes to committing information into a...
