| Base of difference | HDFS | NFS |
| Capacity | Storage capacity is comparatively high then NFS | Storage capacity is comparatively low then NFS |
| Fault-Tolerance | HDFS have feature which was designed to survive failures as it has fault-tolerance or we say replication. | NFS have not a built-in feature to handle fault-tolerance. |
| Data Size | HDFS is mainly used to store and process big data. | NFS is used to store or process small amount of data. |
| Data Storage | Its data blocks are dispersed on the local drives of hardware. | Here data is stored on a single dedicated hardware. |
| Definition | HDFS is one of the file system where data is distributed among many data nodes or networkd computers. | NFS is one of file system or protocol which allows its client to access the file over the network. |
| Domain | HDFS is basically used for multi-domain. | NFS is basically for a single domain. |
| Compatibility with OS | HDFS has different calls and it is mainly used for non-interactive programs. | NFS has the same system calls OS do. |
| Client Server Trust | Here client identity is trusted by the OS. | Here client identity is trusted by default. |
| Reliability | In HDFS data is stored reliably and data is also available after the machine failure | NFS is not reliable as compare to HDFS and data is not available in case of machine failure. |
| Data Redundancy | It runs on a cluster of different machines, data redundancy may occur due to replication protocol. | It runs on a single machine, with no chance of data redundancy. |