Yes, you can use ext4 disks to store HDFS data. Once you have installed HDP, you can set the property : dfs.datanode.data.dir in hdfs-site.xml to point to any locations you want the data to be stored. Below post talks about the same: https://community.hortonworks.com/questions/89786/file-uri-required-for-dfsdatanodedatadir.html For your second question, I am not aware of any rpm which can convert existing data to HDFS. You would have to migrate the existing data to HDFS. There are many ways possible as how to migrate the data also depending upon where the data resides (on disk, in database etc). Below is one basic example of loading the data: https://hortonworks.com/hadoop-tutorial/loading-data-into-the-hortonworks-sandbox/ ... View more