Embodiments of the disclosure provide techniques managing a log-structured solid state drive (SSD) format in a distributed storage system. SSDs in the distributed storage system maintains a journal of logical changes to storage objects to persist prepared and committed changes in the latency path. The journal includes metadata entries that describe changes and reference data pages. Dense data structures (such as a logical block addressing table) index the metadata entries. To reduce the amount of overhead in I/O operations, the distributed storage system maintains the dense data structures in memory rather than on disk.