

If it’s just buckets of data, mergerfs can pool the drives together, and then you can dedupe the whole lot.
Or consider buying a surplus 20tb drive, copy everything to it, dedupe the 20, write back to the 4+4+2 as cold spares. Those surplus drives are $10-14 per tb and I’ve had fantastic luck with them.
I call bullshit. I bet they knew, but saw it as an opportunity for profit and this is all PR spin.