Systems and methods are described for a streamlined garbage collection process during which data integrity checking is also performed for a distributed key-value (KV) store utilized by a distributed storage system. According to one embodiment, by making use of full or truncated block IDs (rather than an intermediate probabilistic data structure, such as a Bloom filter) for garbage collection, data integrity checking can be performed concurrently almost for free. During garbage collection, a block ID compare list may be compared to block IDs within the distributed KV store. If a particular block ID is present in the distributed KV store but is missing from the block ID compare list, the corresponding data block represents garbage to be collected. If the particular block ID is present in the block ID compare list but missing from the distributed KV store, a data integrity error has been identified.