According to one embodiment, a method includes determining, using a processor, which physical blocks are priority physical blocks based on at least one of: a number of application blocks referencing the physical block, and a number of accesses to the physical block, creating a reference to each priority physical block, and outputting the reference. According to another embodiment, a method includes receiving a reference to one or more priority physical blocks in a storage pool, and adjusting an amount of redundancy parity encoding for each of the one or more priority physical blocks based on the reference.