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Design Disk-Based Inventory Serving

Last updated: Jun 30, 2026

Quick Overview

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design disk-based inventory services under tight RAM constraints, focusing on data layout, indexing strategies, caching, write/read paths, conditional updates, concurrency control, and I/O-latency trade-offs.

  • medium
  • Apple
  • System Design
  • Software Engineer

Design Disk-Based Inventory Serving

Company: Apple

Role: Software Engineer

Category: System Design

Difficulty: medium

Interview Round: Technical Screen

Design software for a machine that has no SSD storage and only a small amount of RAM. The machine must service inventory requests using spinning disks. Assume the inventory system stores records keyed by item ID, with values such as available quantity, reserved quantity, and metadata. The system must support reads, updates, and conditional reservation operations such as reserve one unit only if available quantity is greater than zero. Discuss the data layout, indexing strategy, caching strategy, write path, read path, and how you would handle latency given the constraints.

Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design disk-based inventory services under tight RAM constraints, focusing on data layout, indexing strategies, caching, write/read paths, conditional updates, concurrency control, and I/O-latency trade-offs.

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|Home/System Design/Apple

Design Disk-Based Inventory Serving

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Apple
Oct 28, 2025, 12:00 AM
mediumSoftware EngineerTechnical ScreenSystem Design
6
0

Design software for a machine that has no SSD storage and only a small amount of RAM. The machine must service inventory requests using spinning disks.

Assume the inventory system stores records keyed by item ID, with values such as available quantity, reserved quantity, and metadata. The system must support reads, updates, and conditional reservation operations such as reserve one unit only if available quantity is greater than zero.

Discuss the data layout, indexing strategy, caching strategy, write path, read path, and how you would handle latency given the constraints.

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