Garbage Collection And Defragmentation For Solid State Drives (SSD) and Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) Drives

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing computer executable instructions that when executed by a computer control the computer to perform a method, the method comprising:

• accessing data stored on a data storage device (DSD);
• accessing erasure code data for the data, where the erasure code data is sufficient to recreate the data;
• and
• upon determining that a measurement of the amount of active data for a portion of the DSD has fallen below a threshold, selectively deleting the active data on the DSD without copying the active data.

An apparatus, comprising:

• a processor;
• a memory;
• a set of logics;
• and
• an interface that connects the processor, the memory, and the set of logics;
• the set of logics comprising:
• a first logic that provides an erasure code layer to protect data on a solid state drive (SSD) or shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drive;
• a second logic that provides a collective delete function for data on the SSD or SMR drive;
• and
• a third logic that, upon detecting a defragmentation or garbage collection request for the SSD or SMR drive, or, upon detecting a reclamation event for the SSD or SMR drive, controls the second logic to selectively delete data from the SSD or SMR drive, where deleting data from the SSD or SMR drive removes all copies of the deleted data from the SSD or SMR drive without creating a new copy of the deleted data, and where deleting the data from the SSD or SMR drive removes all copies of the data from the apparatus without creating a new copy of the deleted data.

An apparatus, comprising:

• a processor;
• a memory;
• a set of logics;
• and
• an interface that connects the processor, the memory, and the set of logics;
• the set of logics comprising:
• a first logic that provides an erasure code layer to protect data on a solid state drive (SSD) or shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drive;
• a second logic that provides a collective delete function for data on the SSD or SMR drive;
• and
• a third logic that, upon detecting a defragmentation or garbage collection request for the SSD or SMR drive, or, upon detecting a reclamation event for the SSD or SMR drive, controls the second logic to selectively logically delete data from the SSD or SMR drive without creating a new copy of the deleted data by identifying a location associated with the data as being unused or available for writing.

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing computer executable instructions that when executed by a computer control the computer to perform a method, the method comprising:

• accessing a first tape and a second tape;
• writing first data from the first tape to a first contiguous set of overlapping tracks on an SMR device;
• writing second data from the second tape to a second different contiguous set of overlapping tracks on the SMR device;
• and
• providing the SMR device as a collective virtual tape library that virtualizes the first tape and the second tape.

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing computer executable instructions that when executed by a computer control the computer to perform a method, the method comprising:

• accessing data to be stored by a process that writes to a tape drive or to a virtual tape library;
• writing the data to a first contiguous set of overlapping tracks on an SMR device;
• and
• providing the SMR device as a virtual tape library that virtualizes the data as a virtual tape.