A method for garbage collection in a solid state drive (SSD) includes determining whether the SSD is idle by a garbage collection module of the SSD; based on determining that the SSD is idle, determining a victim block from a plurality of memory blocks of the SSD; determining a number of valid pages in the victim block; comparing the determined number of valid pages in the victim block to a valid page threshold; and based on the number of valid pages in the victim block being less than the valid page threshold, issuing a garbage collection request for the victim block.