The small genomics lab experience optimizing data cold storage

Translational research is often a collaborative enterprise that involves basic science researchers, clinicians, and experts in genomics and bioinformatics. While there are central university and industry cores to support data generation, long-term storage often falls to the individual investigators. We frequently fulfill the role of long-term FASTQ file storage for our collaborators. To reduce our cold storage space, we tested the space savings for gzip and zstandard algorithms on an old set of FASTQ files. We found that zstandard had a better overall compression ratio than the best gzip algorithm, amounting to more than 20% space savings overall compared to gzip. It may be worth transitioning to zstandard compression for small, collaborative genomics labs to minimize cold storage costs.