While HDFS always had a great feature of balancing the data between the data nodes in the cluster, often this resulted in skewed disks within data nodes. For instance, if you have four disks, two disks might take the bulk of the data and the other two might be under-utilized. Given that physical disks (say 7,200 or 10,000 rpm) are slow to read/write, this kind of skewing of data results in poor performance. Using an intra-node balancer, we can rebalance the data amongst the disks.

Run the command shown in the following example to invoke disk balancing on a DataNode:

./bin/hdfs diskbalancer -plan 10.0.0.103

The following is the output of the disk balancer command: