A Block Pool is a set of blocks that belong to a single namespace. Datanodes store blocks for all the block pools in the cluster. Each Block Pool is managed independently. This allows a namespace to generate Block IDs for new blocks without the need for coordination with the other namespaces. A Namenode failure does not prevent the Datanode from serving other Namenodes in the cluster.
HDFS blocks are large compared to disk blocks, and the reason is to minimize the cost of seeks. By making a block large enough, the time to transfer the data from the disk can be significantly longer than the time to seek to the start of the block. Thus the time to transfer a large file made of multiple blocks operates at the disk transfer rate.
Having a block abstraction for a distributed filesystem brings several benefits. The first benefit is the most obvious: a file can be larger than any single disk in the network. There’s nothing that requires the blocks from a file to be stored on the same disk, so they can take advantage of any of the disks in the cluster. In fact, it would be possible, if unusual, to store a single file on an HDFS cluster whose blocks filled all the disks in the cluster.