High-Performance Garbage Collection Scheme with Low Data Transfer Overhead for NoC-Based SSDC

Solid-state drives (SSDs) have become the preferred storage solution for performance-critical applications due to their high speed, durability, and energy efficiency. However, the inherent characteristics of NAND flash memory, such as block-level erasure and data fragmentation, necessitate frequent garbage collection (GC) operations to reclaim storage space. These operations, while essential, introduce significant performance overhead, particularly in modern SSD controllers (SSDCs) that utilize network-on-chip (NoC) architectures. In such architectures, GC requires substantial data transfer over interconnects for error correction, leading to increased latency and reduced throughput. This paper presents a novel GC scheme designed to minimize latency in NoC-based SSDCs. Unlike conventional methods that unconditionally transfer data for error correction, the proposed approach selectively determines the data transfer path based on the presence of errors. By leveraging the low error probability of NAND flash memory, this scheme avoids unnecessary data traversal across the interconnect, significantly reducing GC overhead. A hardware implementation using task queues ensures efficient parallelism without disrupting other operations. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme improves SSD performance across various real-world workloads, achieving up to a 26.9% reduction in average latency and a 50.0% reduction in peak latency compared to traditional GC methods. These findings highlight the potential of optimizing data traversal paths in NoC architectures, providing a scalable solution for enhancing SSD performance for diverse applications.