Performance enhancement of garbage collection for flash storage devices: an efficient victim block selection design

Motivated by the needs to enhance the performance of garbage collection in low-cost flash storage devices, we propose a victim block selection design to efficiently identify the blocks for erases and reclaim the space of invalid data without extensively scanning flash memory for the status of data stored in the storage, so as to achieve improved performance of garbage collection on reclaiming space of invalid data. At the same time, this design could also easily identify and reclaim the space released by file systems. A series of experiments based on benchmark traces demonstrates the significantly improved performance of garbage collection with limited system overheads.