Every Byte Written Twice: Storage Engines, B-Trees and LSM Trees

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 28, 2026 · 54m

Fictional platform architect Ottilie Marsh is woken by a storage alarm: SSDs in her condition-monitoring cluster have burned through most of their write endurance in eighteen months. Her database engineer Kwabena, a former plant-historian tuner, finds that every byte the application writes is being written about twenty times. In episode one hundred and twenty we follow that multiplier into the storage engine. We start with the physics of spinning disks and flash, and the three amplifications that frame every design. We build the B-tree from Bayer and McCreight's 1970 paper, see why updating…