Last my googling had some people doing this back in 2.0.x days, and that you could do it if you brought a node down, removed the desired sstable #'s artifacts (Data/Index/etc), and then started up. Probably also with a clearing of the saved caches.
A decent-ish amount of data (256G) in a 2.1 cluster we are trying to upgrade has about 60-70% of the data that could be purged. The data has only partition keys (no column key) and is only written once. So the sstables that are expired don't have data leaking across other sstables. So can we do this: 1) bring down node 2) remove an sstable with obviously old data (we use sstablemetadata tools to doublecheck) 3) clear saved caches 4) start back up And then repair afterward? The table is STCS. We are trying to avoid writing a purge program and prompting a full compaction.
