Paragraph Number

242

Most agents that use block storage do not need the contents of every block to be preserved. File systems, for example, are rarely filled to near the capacity of the underlying block storage device(s). If the file system were to supply a hint to the block storage regarding which specific blocks do not hold data that needs to be preserved, the efficiency of the garbage collection on the underlying block storage system could be improved. However, customizing file-systems and other agents to integrate directly with a garbage-collection-based storage system does not get the benefit of using decoupled, commercially hardened, and robust block APIs and protocols.

Added by DJM 3 2021