There's a section in the Postgres docs about fsync and lying hard drives: http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/wal-reliability.html http://developer.

There's a section in the Postgres docs about fsync and lying hard drives: http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/wal-reliability.html http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/wal-reliabil... There's also a Postgres contrib module called pg_test_fsync that tests various fsync modes on your hard drive, and if you get too high results, you can strongly suspect that the dist is lying.