The Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is designed to store and process large data sets, but HDFS can be less efficient when storing a large number of small files. When there are many small files stored in HDFS, these small files occupy a large portion of the namespace. As a result, disk space is under-utilized because of the namespace limitation.

Hadoop Archives (HAR) can be used to address the namespace limitations associated with storing many small files. A Hadoop Archive packs small files into HDFS blocks more efficiently, thereby reducing NameNode memory usage while still allowing transparent access to files. Hadoop Archives are also compatible with MapReduce, allowing transparent access to the original files by MapReduce jobs.