Garbage Collection

A term associated with the use of solid state drive (SSD) technology in data storage applications. One of the biggest issues is the way these drives collect garbage and delete it from data blocks prior to a write operation. Garbage collection, as it is known in the industry, improves write performance by eliminating the need to perform whole block erasure prior to every write. Working in the background, garbage collection accumulates data blocks previously marked for deletion, performs a whole block erasure on each “garbage” block, and returns the reclaimed space for reuse by subsequent write operations.