R&D: Exploiting Data Duplication to Reduce Data Migration in Garbage Collection Inside SSD

Electronics has published an article written by Shiqiang Nie, Jie Niu, Chaoyun Yang, School of Computer Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China, Peng Zhang, Qiong Yang, Dong Wang, Xi’an Aeronautics Computing Technique Research Institute, Xi’an 710065, China, and Weiguo Wu, School of Computer Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China.

Abstract: “NAND flash memory has been widely adopted as the primary data storage medium in data centers. However, the inherent characteristic of out-of-place updates in NAND flash necessitates garbage collection (GC) operations on NAND flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs), aimed at reclaiming flash blocks occupied by invalid data. GC processes entail additional read and write operations, which can lead to the blocking of user requests, thereby increasing the tail latency. Moreover, frequent execution of GC operations is prone to induce more pages to be written, further reducing the lifetime of SSDs. In light of these challenges, we introduce an innovative GC scheme, termed SplitGC. This scheme leverages the records of data redundancy gathered during periodic read scrub operations within the SSD. By analyzing these features of data duplication, SplitGC enhances the selection strategy for the victim block. Furthermore, it bifurcates the migration of valid data pages into two phases: non-duplicate pages follow standard relocation procedures, whereas the movement of duplicate pages is scheduled during idle periods of the SSD. The experiment results show that our scheme reduces tail latency induced by GC by 8% to 83% at the 99.99th percentile and significantly decreases the amount of valid page migration by 38% to 67% compared with existing schemes.“