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You actually have to use it though. TokenAware is one of many policies most of which can be layered on top of one another. Just depends on how they had the driver configured.

Token aware is the default now, but Thumbtack benchmarked with the two year old Thrift client instead.

I know the Astyanax driver from Netflix supports a "token aware" strategy. Here is a link to the docs:

https://github.com/Netflix/astyanax/wiki/Configuration

Depending on how the consistency level is set it could potentially save a "route" to the other host.

Some drivers do. Some drivers don't. Before DataStax started providing their own driver, the default Cassandra driver didn't.