tag: disk-io
articles: 2 · beats: 1
latest: September 1, 2026
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Disk Io
2 Crashtech articles on Disk Io, filed under System Design, published between August 2026 and September 2026. Every piece is full-text HTML with sources, structured data and an authored FAQ.
All 2 sit in the System Design beat. System Design
What Actually Happens Inside a Database Index: The Data Structures
An index trades disk I/O for lookup speed. Here's how B-trees, hash tables, and bitmap indexes each make that trade differently.
LSM-Trees vs B-Trees: Why Cassandra Chose Sequential Writes
B-trees seek random disk positions. LSM-trees buffer in memory and flush sequentially, converting random I/O into sequential writes for millions of ops/sec.
Questions we answer about Disk Io
- Why does an index's internal data structure matter if it all ends up 'faster than a scan'?
- Why is disk I/O the thing index structures are actually optimizing for?
- Why can't a hash index handle range queries?
- What makes a bitmap index different from a B-tree, and when is it better?
- Why do B-trees stay balanced automatically as data is inserted?
- What is the fundamental difference between LSM-trees and B-trees?
- Why does sequential disk I/O matter for write performance?
- What happens during the LSM compaction process?
- What is read amplification and how do Bloom filters fix it?
- When should I choose LSM-trees over B-trees?
Covered alongside
Frequently asked questions
What does Crashtech publish about Disk Io?
2 articles tagged Disk Io, the most recent published September 1, 2026. All 2 sit in the System Design beat. Each carries numbered sources, an authored FAQ and full structured data.
What questions about Disk Io does Crashtech answer directly?
10 questions have a dedicated answer page under this tag, including “Why does an index's internal data structure matter if it all ends up 'faster than a scan'?”. Each answer is authored prose from the article it belongs to, not a generated summary.
Can AI assistants read Crashtech's Disk Io coverage?
Yes. Crashtech serves full static HTML to every crawler, allows all major AI user agents in robots.txt, and publishes an llms.txt manifest plus a full-text corpus, so assistants can retrieve and cite these articles directly.