PcGC: A Parity-Check Garbage Collection for Boosting 3-D NAND Flash Performance

Garbage collection or GC running in the controller of 3-D NAND flash-based solid-state disks—SSDs—plays a critical role in the performance of storage systems. SSD manufacturers have developed various GC solutions based on internal data movement or IDM to mitigate the impacts of GC on request latency. Due to the circuit characteristics of flash memory, the existing IDM-based GC strategies are restricted by page parity during data movement: odd pages must be migrated to odd pages, and even pages to even pages. When migrating two consecutive pages with the same parity, the free page between the two migrated pages will be wasted after the migration is complete. This ever-increasing page waste problem inevitably deteriorates the storage space utilization of flash memory, thereby degrading the overall performance of 3-D NAND flash-based SSDs. To address this issue, we propose a parity-check GC scheme called PcGC to revamp SSD performance by alleviating page waste during GC. We build a parity-check unit in PcGC to facilitate checking the parity of migrated valid pages and destination pages. According to the parity results offered by the parity-check unit, PcGC dynamically adjusts the migration order of valid pages during the course of GC. In doing so, PcGC fundamentally averts page waste caused by the page parity restriction, thereby enhancing 3-D NAND flash performance. We quantitatively evaluate the performance of PcGC in terms of wasted pages, storage utilization, GC counts, write amplification, and average response time. We compare PcGC against the two state-of-the-art schemes—Amphibian and Tiny-tail flash (TTflash). The experimental results derived from the nine real-world workload traces unfold that compared with Amphibian and TTflash: 1) PcGC curtails the number of wasted pages by up to 91.4% with an average of 53.75%; 2) cuts back the number of GC counts by up to 52.2% with an average of 11.9%; and 3) slashes average write response time by up to 77.8% with an average of 13.0%.