One or more buckets of key-value pairs of a first node of a distributed storage system are selected to be migrated to a second node of the distributed storage system. One or more underlying database files corresponding to the one or more selected buckets are identified. The one or more identified underlying database files are directly copied from a storage of a first node to a storage of the second node. The copied underlying database files are linked in a database of the second node to implement the one or more selected buckets in the second node.