Zone-Based Storage Garbage Collection Without Victim Overlap

Resolve Bottlenecks,
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions

Solution Overview

Problem

Existing storage devices face inefficiencies in managing storage space due to overlapping victim zones during host and device garbage collection operations, leading to reduced storage efficiency.

Innovation Solution

A storage device system that includes a controller to manage zones by excluding source zones based on data copy requests and selecting victim zones satisfying garbage collection trigger conditions, thereby preventing overlap and optimizing garbage collection operations.

Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles

VSEngineering Contradiction Analysis

1Productivity

If the storage device performs garbage collection operations without excluding source zones, then the garbage collection can be performed on all zones, but it causes overlapping victim zones leading to duplicate data copying and reduced storage efficiency

Engineering Contradiction:

Improvegarbage collection efficiencyVSAvoidstorage space utilization

Core Design Contradiction:

ProductivityVSLoss of substance

Solution Approach 1:

The controller performs preliminary actions by excluding source zones from the victim zone selection before executing garbage collection. This preliminary exclusion prevents overlapping victim zones and duplicate data copying during the subsequent garbage collection operation, thereby improving storage efficiency without compromising garbage collection productivity.

Inventive Principle:

Principle #10Preliminary action

Solution Approach 2:

The invention extracts or separates source zones from the set of candidate victim zones. By taking out source zones that are currently being used for data copy operations, the system avoids selecting them as victim zones, thus preventing duplicate data copying and optimizing storage space utilization during garbage collection.

Inventive Principle:

Principle #2Taking out (Extraction)

2Device complexity

If the storage device selects victim zones without considering execution history, then the victim zone selection is simpler, but it may select zones that cause overlapping with host garbage collection and reduce storage efficiency

Engineering Contradiction:

Improvevictim zone selection complexityVSAvoidstorage space utilization

Core Design Contradiction:

Device complexityVSLoss of substance

Solution Approach 1:

The controller uses feedback from execution history of data copy operations to inform the victim zone selection process. By analyzing which zones have been recently used for data copying, the system can exclude those zones from being selected as victims, thereby avoiding overlapping with host garbage collection and optimizing storage efficiency.

Inventive Principle:

Principle #23Feedback

Solution Approach 2:

The system performs preliminary analysis of execution history before selecting victim zones. This preliminary action identifies zones that should be excluded based on recent data copy operations, ensuring that the subsequent victim zone selection does not cause overlapping or duplicate data copying.

Inventive Principle:

Principle #10Preliminary action

Data Source

PatentUS20260037431A1Storage device and method of operating the same

Publication Date: 2026.02.05 SK HYNIX INC

AI summary

A storage device includes a memory device and a controller. The memory device may include a plurality of zones which is a storage area respectively corresponding to logical address groups. The controller may control the memory device to exclude a source zone in which a data copy operation is performed according to a request of the host and select a victim zone satisfying a garbage collection trigger condition among the plurality of zones, and perform garbage collection for the victim zone.