fsync is a linux system call that flushes all pages and metadata for a given file to the disk. It is indeed an expensive operation but required for durability especially for database systems. Regular writes that make it to the disk controller are often placed in the SSD local cache to accumulate more writes before getting flushed to the NAND cells. However when the disk controller receives this flush command it is required to immediately persist all of the data to the NAND cells. Some SSDs however don't do that because they don't trust the host and no-op the fsync. In this video I explain this in details and go through details on how postgres provide so many options to fine tune fsync