Thanks for the information. In using this command, it did cause some serious performance degradation when writing to HDFS. Every 128MB block would take about 20-30 secs to write to HDFS. The issue had to do with trying to compress the tar file. It's better to remove the "z" flag in tar and not compress.   Just to provide some numbers, writing almost 1TB of data from local disk to HDFS would take 13+ hours with compression (z) and it would actually eventually fail due to kerberos ticket expiration. Removing the "z" flag, the copy to HDFS took less than an hour for the same 1TB of data!  ... View more