Post
Perhaps the main thing we task our computers with is remembering things for us, so we need hardware that can do this job! It was only a few weeks ago that finalized how I'd handle this in my string-centric hypothetical computer: NVMe (message-based with RAM) & a custom filesystem.
NVMe facilitates reliably transferring "pages" of data between transient & persistent memory, whilst spreading out wear & tear without getting in the way of optimizations.
1/3?
To deliver this reliability the harddrive needs to go beyond error-detection to give us error correction, since it can't ask the past to repeat itself. The algorithms I know for this are Hamming Codes & Reed-Solomon Codes, though Hamming wouldn't be good enough here.
The harddrive would need its own processor, though toggling & shifting bits should give us everything it'd need.
On top of this the OS needs to layer a filesystem for securely multiplexing between several programs.
2/4?
I'd use a custom filesystem, since I understandably struggled to find an existing one that caters to the weird CPU I designed. Though I took some BtrFS inspiration.
In short it'd use copy-on-write BTrees with variable-length keys to organize your "files" stored on disk. The copy-on-write means modified data wouldn't overwrite the old data, letting "snapshots" keep it around in case you need to recover it.
I'd have obligations to support folders, but I might prefer to search by metadata.
3/4!
For security I'd let extra-sensitive data/programs/folders like your passwords or screen require its callers (whether by hash or developer-ID) to be signed by a certain cryptographic key. Or by yours (provided you've registered a boot password), letting you bypass these warning screens.
You'd use an authorized authenticator to bypass these warnings, which would provide a per-user+program key that can also encrypt data. Protecting it even from those directly accessing the harddrive.
4/4!
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