Btw, because nobody has said it explicitly yet: you should start at BTrees [1]. As you guessed, the database folks were the primary "we have to deal with spinning disk and it really matters to be fast" people.
There's also the Log-Structured < Noun > universe of things which 'tlb is pointing you at. Roughly, you turn random writes into appends (to a "log"), often followed by periodic compaction to make reads reasonable (since in-place updates to a "file" are now appended at the end of the log, you've suddenly made reads worse).
Btw, because nobody has said it explicitly yet: you should start at BTrees [1]. As you guessed, the database folks were the primary "we have to deal with spinning disk and it really matters to be fast" people.
There's also the Log-Structured < Noun > universe of things which 'tlb is pointing you at. Roughly, you turn random writes into appends (to a "log"), often followed by periodic compaction to make reads reasonable (since in-place updates to a "file" are now appended at the end of the log, you've suddenly made reads worse).
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-tree