Note that Oracle still uses "raw" block devices for high-performance configurations. It's called Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM), basically you give i

Note that Oracle still uses "raw" block devices for high-performance configurations. It's called Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM), basically you give it a bunch of block devices without any partitions or file systems on them and ASM does its own "extent" placement, striping, mirroring, snapshots, etc. And Oracle's Exadata scale-out appliance also uses block devices without any filesystems directly, the DB nodes talk to any storage nodes over InfiniBand/RDMA (older hardware) or RDMA over Ethernet/RoCE.