Simplicity as the Ultimate Principle: The Art of Garbage Collection Management in SSDs Inspired by Natural Data Behavior
Keyu Wang, Huailiang Tan, Keqin Li · ACM Transactions on Storage · 2025
As solid-state drives (SSDs) are increasingly used in various computing environments, effective garbage collection (GC) management is crucial for enhancing performance and extending lifespan. Existing GC strategies rely on complex data categorization techniques to distinguish between hot and cold data. This process is not only computationally expensive but also inefficient. This article introduces a revolutionary simplified GC management method, which we call SUP-GC, based on the core design principle that simplicity is the ultimate principle. SUP-GC requires almost no computation and naturally redefines the data storage pattern. All newly written data is defaulted as hot data and stored directly in hot data blocks; data that needs to be moved during the GC process is considered cold data and uniformly migrated to cold data blocks. Our strategy eliminates the need for precise but resource-intensive real-time analysis of data states and instead adopts a storage strategy that is highly consistent with the natural properties of data. This intuitive partitioning significantly reduces the need for complex judgments about data states, thereby optimizing the storage management process. Experiments and designs on real SSDs have shown that our SUP-GC strategy significantly outperforms existing mainstream GC methods.