In one aspect the invention provides a signal bearing medium tangibly embodying a program of machine-readable instructions that are executable by a digital processing apparatus to perform operations to determine a maintenance fee for a data storage system. The operations include monitoring at least one data storage device during operation of the data storage system to determine a duty cycle and determining a current value of the maintenance fee based at least in part on the determined duty cycle. In a further disk drive-based embodiment the operations may include, or be instead, determining a disk drive redundancy configuration of disk drives of a data storage system. The operations then compare the determined duty cycle to a threshold value and assert a redundancy configuration change signal based on the result of the comparison. For a RAID configuration embodiment having a RAID level, the asserting operation asserts a RAID level change signal based on the result of the comparison.