As an aside, I'm reading Greg Smith's PG 9.0 High Performance, and it's an excellent in depth study of database optimization. The first 90 pages are bottom up: storage technologies and how to tune and benchmark them, memory, cpu, file system choices, and operating system tuning parameters. Once the fundamentals are in order, it covers the internals of PG in even more interesting detail.
Trivia: A fsync call on any file on ext3 will force a sync of not just that file but the whole volume; ext4 fixes that. If you buy large SATA drives, then partition them to "short stroke" using only the outside of the disk (discarding the slower spinning inner region) you get competitive performance to SAS disks for many workloads.
One of the best low level books I've found in a long time.
It could be your use of the word 'trivia.' At least in the US, it sometimes carries a negative connotation. It might read to some like you are being sarcastic.
Trivia: A fsync call on any file on ext3 will force a sync of not just that file but the whole volume; ext4 fixes that. If you buy large SATA drives, then partition them to "short stroke" using only the outside of the disk (discarding the slower spinning inner region) you get competitive performance to SAS disks for many workloads.
One of the best low level books I've found in a long time.