Is there any feasible and easy option to use a local folder as a Hadoop HDFS folder - hadoop

Question

I have a massive chunk of files in an extremely fast SAN disk that I like to do Hive query on them.
An obvious option is to copy all files into HDFS by using a command like this:
hadoop dfs -copyFromLocal /path/to/file/on/filesystem /path/to/input/on/hdfs
However, I don't want to create a second copy of my files, just to be to Hive query in them.
Is there any way to point an HDFS folder into a local folder, such that Hadoop sees it as an actual HDFS folder? The files keep adding to the SAN disk, so Hadoop needs to see the new files as they are being added.
This is similar to Azure's HDInsight approach that you copy your files into a blob storage and HDInsight's Hadoop sees them through HDFS.

Answer 1

For playing around with small files using the local file system might be fine, but I wouldn't do it for any other purpose.
Putting a file in an HDFS means that it is being split to blocks which are replicated and distributed.
This gives you later on both performance and availability.
Locations of [external] tables can be directed to the local file system using file:///.
Whether it works smoothly or you'll start getting all kinds of error, that's to be seen.
Please note that for the demo I'm doing here a little trick to direct the location to a specific file, but your basic use will probably be for directories.
Demo
create external table etc_passwd
(
Username string
,Password string
,User_ID int
,Group_ID int
,User_ID_Info string
,Home_directory string
,shell_command string
)
row format delimited
fields terminated by ':'
stored as textfile
location 'file:///etc'
;
alter table etc_passwd set location 'file:///etc/passwd'
;
select * from etc_passwd limit 10
;
+----------+----------+---------+----------+--------------+-----------------+----------------+
| username | password | user_id | group_id | user_id_info | home_directory | shell_command |
+----------+----------+---------+----------+--------------+-----------------+----------------+
| root | x | 0 | 0 | root | /root | /bin/bash |
| bin | x | 1 | 1 | bin | /bin | /sbin/nologin |
| daemon | x | 2 | 2 | daemon | /sbin | /sbin/nologin |
| adm | x | 3 | 4 | adm | /var/adm | /sbin/nologin |
| lp | x | 4 | 7 | lp | /var/spool/lpd | /sbin/nologin |
| sync | x | 5 | 0 | sync | /sbin | /bin/sync |
| shutdown | x | 6 | 0 | shutdown | /sbin | /sbin/shutdown |
| halt | x | 7 | 0 | halt | /sbin | /sbin/halt |
| mail | x | 8 | 12 | mail | /var/spool/mail | /sbin/nologin |
| uucp | x | 10 | 14 | uucp | /var/spool/uucp | /sbin/nologin |
+----------+----------+---------+----------+--------------+-----------------+----------------+

Answer 2

You can mount your hdfs path into local folder, for example with hdfs mount
Please follow this for more info
But if you want speed, it isn't an option