#data-storage
42 episodes
#5252: Paper in a Safe: The Most Rugged Key Backup
Hardware tokens protect your key from being copied. Paper in a safe protects it from being lost. You need both.
#5207: Hard Drives Are Having Their Biggest Boom in a Decade
Everyone assumes flash killed the spinning disk. Seagate's 52% margins and sold-out capacity through 2028 say otherwise.
#5203: Why LTO Tape Still Backs Up the Cloud
Magnetic tape isn't dead — it's holding up the cloud. How LTO-10 broke a 25-year compatibility promise, and why AI needs tape more than ever.
#5132: Why Japan Still Hoards Optical Media
Japan builds bullet trains but still buys Blu-rays. The surprising logic behind the world's most advanced tech holdout.
#5044: Abilene's AI Arms Race: Power, Water, and Backlash
Why a Texas town of 100,000 is hosting the biggest AI build ever—and why locals are starting to push back.
#4704: Building a Unified AI Filesystem with Rclone and MinIO
How to build a single virtual filesystem for AI agents across multiple cloud storage providers — without the token headaches.
#4688: Why 3,000 Episodes Vanished From Spotify (And Came Back)
The December episode wasn't deleted — Spotify just wasn't told about it. Here's how 4,600 episodes reappeared.
#4671: Building a Miniature Cloud: Proxmox, MinIO, and the Seams
Proxmox alone isn't a private cloud. What does it actually take to build one?
#4546: Redis: What It Actually Is and Why It's Everywhere
Redis powers half the internet's caching, but almost nobody knows what it actually is. We break it down from the ground up.
#4545: Redis: The Data Structure Server Explained
From a single C file to the default caching answer. How Redis became the web's favorite data structure server.
#3431: How YouTube Stores 500 Hours of Video Every Minute
YouTube's videos are shredded, replicated across global servers, and stored at a cost approaching zero. Here's how.
#3217: When a Truck Beats the Internet: Shipping Data at Scale
Why FedEx sometimes beats fiber for moving massive datasets across the country.
#3073: What 40,000-Year-Old Paint Teaches Us About Digital Storage
Cave paintings outlasted carved stone. Now engineers are using that chemistry to build千年-proof discs.
#2685: Plugin Data Storage for AI Agents
How to separate user data from plugin code across Linux, macOS, and Windows in agentic AI environments.
#2571: How S3 Billing Actually Works (And Why R2 Is Different)
Storage is the decoy cost. The real surprises come from request charges, egress fees, and early deletion penalties.
#2475: Docker Volumes: Why They Can't Move and What To Do
Docker made apps portable but left your data stuck. Here's how to actually move volumes between hosts.
#2465: JSON-L vs Parquet: When Each Format Wins
How far can JSON-L scale before it breaks? And why does Parquet dominate for millions of rows?
#2438: The Folder Illusion: How Object Storage Fakes Hierarchy
Blobs, flat namespaces, and why those "folders" in cloud storage are complete illusions.
#2368: The Multi-Stage Pipeline Behind Netflix's Recommendations
Unpacking the multi-stage AI pipeline behind Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon’s "you might also like" suggestions—from candidate generation to real-tim...
#2271: Vector Search in a Single File
What if you could do vector search with just SQLite? We explore sqlite-vec, the extension that adds embeddings to the world's simplest database, an...
#2064: Why GPT-5 Is Stuck: The Data Wall Explained
The "bigger is better" era of AI is over. Here's why the industry hit a data wall and shifted to a new scaling law.
#2011: Saving AI Knowledge Beyond the Chat Window
We're brilliant at prompting AI, but terrible at saving the answers. Here's why that "digital masterpiece on a chalkboard" vanishes.
#2010: Building Better AI Memory Systems
We obsess over AI inputs but treat outputs like Snapchat messages. Here's why that's a massive blind spot.
#1989: Your Cloud Photos Vanish If You Miss a $5 Bill
Is your data safe in the cloud, or is it one missed payment away from oblivion?