OK,
So with some help from the IRC channel (thanks macdice and JanniCash) it's come to light that my RAID1 comprised of 2 * 7200RPM disks is reporting ~500 ops/sec in pg_test_fsync.
This is higher than the ~120 ops/sec which you would expect from 720RPM disks - therefore something is lying.
Breaking up the RAID and re-imaging with JBOD dropped this to 50 ops/sec - another question but still looking like a real result.
So in this case it looks like the RAID controller wasn't disabling caching as advertised.
Cheers,
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