Taking garbage collection overheads off the critical path in SSDs

Abstract

Solid state disks (SSDs) have the potential to revolutionize the storage system landscape, mostly due to their good random access performance, compared to hard disks. However, garbage collection (GC) in SSD introduces significant latencies and large performance variations, which renders widespread adoption of SSDs difficult. To address this issue, we present a novel garbage collection strategy, consisting of two components, called Advanced Garbage Collection (AGC) and Delayed Garbage Collection (DGC), that operate collectively to migrate GC operations from busy periods to idle periods. More specifically, AGC is employed to defer GC operations to idle periods in advance, based on the type of the idle periods and on-demand GC needs, whereas DGC complements AGC by handling the collections that could not be handled by AGC. Our comprehensive experimental analysis reveals that the proposed strategies provide stable SSD performance by significantly reducing GC overheads. Compared to the state-of-the-art GC strategies, P-FTL, L-FTL and H-FTL, our AGC+DGC scheme reduces GC overheads, on average, by about 66.7%, 96.7% and 98.2%, respectively. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.