IDrive e2

What IDrive e2 actually is

IDrive e2 is the S3-compatible object storage arm of IDrive Inc., the privately held Calabasas, California company best known for its consumer and SMB backup software. IDrive launched e2 on 13 April 2022 as a direct challenge to both AWS S3 and the discount-storage cluster of Wasabi and Backblaze B2, and the pitch has not changed since: hot object storage at a flat per-terabyte rate with almost nothing metered on top. It sits in our /category/cloud-object-storage comparison as the price-led option.

Technically it is conventional, which is what you want from object storage. The API implements the commonly used subset of the Amazon S3 API — enough that the overwhelming majority of S3 tooling works against it — and IDrive maintains one of the longest compatibility lists we have seen: dedicated setup guides for backup tools (Arq, BackupAssist, Cohesity, Commvault, Arcserve, Arctera, MSP360, CubeBackup), media and collaboration platforms (iconik, CuttingRoom, Dalet Flex), NAS appliances (Buffalo TerraStations), database and analytics stacks (Snowflake external stages, Apache Iceberg, Couchbase), and plain clients like Cyberduck and CrossFTP. Region-specific endpoint URLs let you pin tools to the nearest region, and there is a latency-check utility before you commit to one.

The feature set above the raw API is genuinely useful rather than decorative. Cross-region replication copies buckets between regions for redundancy and compliance. Object lock brings immutability for ransomware protection and regulatory retention, backed by bucket versioning and file lock. Event notifications support webhooks as a destination — Wasabi does not — and there is bucket logging for access auditing, MFA on accounts and MFA-protected bucket deletion, TLS in transit with encryption at rest in facilities with physical and biometric access controls, and free migration of data from other cloud storage providers. An "On-Demand Direct Access" option deploys IDrive e2 on your premises when recovery-time objectives demand it. In our view this is a real product, not a loss-leader skin on someone else's hardware.

Pricing: what you really pay

The rate card is short enough to quote wholesale. Pay-as-you-go storage is $0.006 per GB per month — $6 per TB per month — and IDrive states plainly that there are no additional charges for ingress, egress within policy, data deletion, or API requests. Egress is free up to three times your active storage volume per month, then $0.01 per GB per month. There is no minimum storage duration and no deletion penalty, which is the policy that most sharply separates e2 from Wasabi's 90-day minimum retention on pay-as-you-go. If you exceed a plan's storage limit, overage is $0.006 per GB per month.

The fine print that matters: pay-as-you-go accounts carry a 1 TB minimum storage fee. Store 900 GB for a full billing cycle and you are billed $6 anyway. Small buckets are therefore more expensive per GB than the headline suggests, and the 10 GB free trial is the only economical way to run tiny datasets. Annual plans start at $59.50 per year for 1 TB — about $4.96 per TB per month — with a first-year promotion at $29.75 (50% off), reverting to standard billing afterward.

That first-year number is where the widely circulated "$2.49/TB" claim comes from, and it is promotional math, not the ongoing rate. We have corrected our own listing accordingly. The honest ongoing comparison is $6/TB/month against Wasabi's $7.99/TB/month (with its retention rules and 1x free egress versus e2's 3x), and against AWS S3 at many multiples of both for hot storage. On a 10 TB archive with moderate reads, e2's 3x egress allowance and free deletes make the effective bill unusually close to the sticker price — an area where most storage vendors quietly make their margin.

Performance & infrastructure

IDrive publishes a 2026 object storage performance benchmark claiming faster upload and download performance than Wasabi across all tested configurations. We treat that as what it is — a vendor-run comparison — and we have not run our own fio or rclone throughput tests against e2, so we will not attach numbers to it. What we can verify is the footprint: the locations page describes 15 storage regions across the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and the public endpoint table lists region URLs for Oregon, Los Angeles, San Jose, a second Oregon site, Phoenix, Chicago, Dallas, Virginia, Miami, Montreal, Ireland, London, a second London site, Paris, two Frankfurt sites, Singapore, and Tokyo. That is 18 endpoints against a stated 15 regions, a discrepancy we cannot reconcile from the public pages; either way, US, EU, and APAC coverage is real, with EU presence in Ireland, the UK, France, and Germany.

Security and compliance posture leans on the parent company: SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 certifications are cited for the data-center estate, IDrive is certified to the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Frameworks, and the storage layer uses RAID-protected NAS and SAN devices with multiple redundancy levels in its wider infrastructure description. Data residency is selectable per bucket by region, which covers the common GDPR requirement of keeping EU data in EU regions — a point in e2's favor over providers that store everything in one country.

What is missing is an intelligible SLA. IDrive publishes a Service Level Agreement that explicitly covers IDrive e2 and was last updated in November 2025, but the uptime commitment and service-credit tiers were not present in the page text we could render, and at least one third-party directory lists e2's SLA uptime as unknown. For a storage tier holding production data, that is a transparency gap we hold against the product. There is also no published history of availability incidents, and no CDN layer — if you need edge delivery of the objects themselves, you are adding Bunny, Cloudflare, or similar in front of it.

Where it falls short

The 1 TB billing floor is the first honest complaint. The headline rate is excellent at terabyte scale and mediocre below it, and the trial tier does not change that for anything you actually keep. Second, the track record is young: e2 has been publicly available since April 2022, so it lacks the multi-year operational history of S3 or even B2, and IDrive's core business is backup software rather than infrastructure services — the same concentration risk that accompanied the shutdown of IDrive Compute, which we review separately.

Third, the marketing has been loose. "World's fastest S3 compatible storage" in the launch release and the circulating per-terabyte prices built on first-year discounts are exactly the patterns that make buyers do arithmetic they should not have to do. The pricing page itself is honest; the surrounding promotion is louder than the pricing page.

Fourth, the ecosystem is broad but shallow in places: S3 compatibility covers the commonly used subset of the API, not every corner of it, so unusual API calls can fail against e2 when they work against AWS. And while integration guides are plentiful, developer documentation depth — lifecycle rules, consistency semantics, request error taxonomy — is thinner than the hyperscalers'.

Who should pick this

We pick IDrive e2 when the workload is a budget-sensitive, multi-terabyte, S3-shaped store: backups from Arq, MSP360, or your own rclone scripts; media archives behind a CDN; data-lake and Iceberg tables; Snowflake external stages; MSPs aggregating client data at low cost. The combination of free API calls, free deletes, no retention penalty, and 3x free egress is hard to beat for read-moderate archives, and EU region choice makes it usable for European data sets.

We would not pick it for hyperscale platforms that depend on deep S3 API surface area, for buyers who require a credit-backed uptime SLA they can read before signing, or for sub-terabyte datasets where the minimum bites. And if your data is the kind of thing a company disappearing would seriously hurt, weigh the age of the service and the corporate focus alongside the price — then decide how reversible the position is.

Key takeaways

• Flat $0.006/GB/month ($6/TB/month) pay-as-you-go with no charges for ingress, deletes, or API requests; egress free up to 3x stored volume, then $0.01/GB.
• 1 TB billing minimum ($6/month floor) — the headline rate only holds at terabyte scale and above.
• The famous "$2.49/TB" figure is first-year promotional math ($29.75/year for 1 TB); ongoing annual is $59.50/year for 1 TB.
• No minimum storage duration and no deletion penalties — the sharpest difference from Wasabi's 90-day retention rule.
• 15 stated storage regions (18 listed endpoints) across the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia; SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 certified facilities.
• SLA exists but its uptime commitment is not publicly legible, and the service is young (launched April 2022) — factor both in for production-critical data.

Sources

• https://www.idrive.com/s3-storage-e2/
• https://www.idrive.com/s3-storage-e2/pricing
• https://www.idrive.com/s3-storage-e2/locations
• https://idrive.com/s3-storage-e2/e2-endpoint-urls
• https://idrive.com/s3-storage-e2/e2-vs-wasabi
• https://idrive.com/terms_sla
• https://s3providers.com/providers/idrive-e2
• https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/13/idrive-launches-e2-a-new-s3-compatible-object-storage-service
• https://en.idrive.com/online-backup-company