Patent 9395937 was granted and assigned to EMC on July, 2016 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A method is used in managing storage space in storage systems. Metadata of a slice of a storage pool in a data storage system is evaluated for returning the slice as free storage to the storage pool. Based on the evaluation, returning of the slice to the storage pool is affected. The metadata of the slice indicates whether the slice includes user data.