POOL LEVEL GARBAGE COLLECTION AND WEAR LEVELING OF SOLID STATE DEVICES

摘要

The operation of a pool of solid state drives is orchestrated to manage garbage collection and wear leveling. Each individual solid state drive is operated in either an Active Mode in which I/O commands are processed or in a Maintenance Mode in which garbage collection is performed and no I/O commands are processed. The selection of solid state drives in the Active Mode is further selected to achieve wear leveling over the pool of solid state drives. A virtualization layer provides dynamic mapping of virtual volume addresses to physical solid state drives.

主权项

1. A storage system, comprising:
a plurality of solid state drive (SSD) devices; an interface to communicate with a host computer; each SSD device configured to respond to garbage collection control commands to stop and start garbage collection operations and provide information on the amount of free pages in response to a free page status request; and each SSD device configured to respond to provide wear level information to monitor the endurance level of each SSD device;
wherein the storage system is configured to manage the operation of the plurality of SSD devices so that each individual SSD device has an Active Mode in which all host read/write commands are processed and a Maintenance Mode in which a limited subset of host read/write commands are processed and garbage collection operations are performed and wherein the operation of the plurality of SSD devices is managed to balance endurance over all of the SSD devices.