Cassandra Practice Test 2025 – Comprehensive All-in-One Guide to Exam Success!

A replication factor greater than 1 in a Cassandra cluster indicates that data is copied multiple times across different nodes. This redundancy ensures high availability and fault tolerance, but it inherently means that more physical storage is needed to accommodate these duplicate copies of data. For example, if the replication factor is set to 3, each piece of data is stored on three separate nodes.

This leads to increased storage requirements since the total amount of disk space needed is multiplied by the replication factor. As a result, while read speeds might not necessarily improve and recovery times might actually be longer due to the need to synchronize more copies, the fundamental necessity here is that the total storage capacity must support all the replicated data. Thus, this is the reason why an increased storage in the cluster is a requirement when the replication factor is greater than 1.