HDFS has a way to balance the data blocks across the data nodes, but there is no such balancing inside the same data node with multiple hard disks. Hence, a 12-spindle DataNode can have out of balance physical disks. But why does this matter to performance? Well, by having out of balance disks, the blocks at DataNode level might be the same as other DataNodes but the reads/writes will be skewed because of imbalanced disks. Hence, Hadoop 3.x introduces the intra-node balancer to balance the physical disks inside each data node to reduce the skew of the data. 

This increases the reads and writes performed by any process running on the cluster, such as a mapper or reducer.