How we’re dealing with a data space crunch

I can still remember a few years ago when people were claiming the cost of SSDs were going down so fast, that they could reach parity with spinning rust “within a few years”. This may end up proving true, if only because the cost of both classes of storage have been going up! For the servers I maintain for us and our broader family, I’ve had a policy of “downgrading” drives older than six years for non-critical data, and ten years for complete removal. The prices on drives at the moment have me… reviewing these positions. Some things I’m thinking about: Being a bit more aggressive with ZFS inline compression for data that’s infrequently accessed. The performance impact I’ve measured going from lzip to gzip was far lower than I expected, at least for our data and use cases. Evaluating my use of ZFS mirrors. I trust mirrors more, and they have better read performance for media. But… that’s a lot of space. I’m tempted to split out some of our pools into a RAID-Z2. This would require…