The replication factor is a feature of HDFS that can be set appropriately for the entire cluster to adjust the number of times the blocks are replicated to ensure high data availability. For each block stored in HDFS, the cluster has n-1 duplicated blocks. Thus, if the replication factor is set to 1 instead of the default value of 3 during the PUT operation, there will be a single copy of the data. If the replication factor is set to 1, only a single copy of the data would be lost if the data node crashed under these circumstances.