@mike_bronson7    It seems to me like this is a symptom of having the default replication set to 3. This is for redundancy and processing capability within HDFS. It is recommended to have minimum 3 data nodes in the cluster to accommodate 3 healthy replicas of a block (as we have a default replication of 3).  HDFS will not write replicas of the same blocks to the same data node. In your scenario there will be under replicated blocks and 1 healthy replica will be placed on the available data node.   You may run setrep [1] to change the replication factor. If you provide a path to a directory then the command recursively changes the replication factor of all files under the directory tree rooted at path.    hdfs dfs -setrep -w 1 /user/hadoop/dir1   [1] https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/current/hadoop-project-dist/hadoop-common/FileSystemShell.html#setrep ... View more