HDFS
works with commodity hardware (systems with average configurations) that has
high chances of getting crashed any time. Thus, to make the entire system
highly fault-tolerant, HDFS replicates and stores data in different places. Any
data on HDFS gets stored at atleast 3 different locations. So, even if one of
them is corrupted and the other is unavailable for some time for any reason,
then data can be accessed from the third one. Hence, there is no chance of
losing the data. This replication factor helps us to attain the feature of
Hadoop called Fault Tolerant.
