Idrive e2 Review 2025

part one

At this week's VeeamOn 2025 conference that I attended in San Diego, I came across a company in the vendor hall that, admittedly, I had not heard of before. iDrive. Or is it Idrive? Or IDRIVE? Guessing from the logo, it is IDrive, so that is how I will capitalize it for the rest of the article.

I want to be clear upfront, I am going to be focused on IDrive e2, which is their s3 S3-compatible cloud storage option. I want to see how I can leverage this for my Veeam homelab as a Scale Out Backup Repository. So, if you are looking for a review of their consumer products, move along!

The reason they caught my attention in a very busy vendor hall is that they were supposedly offering 100TB of free storage for a year for people who signed up while at the conference. This made me very interested indeed, so I chatted with the reps manning the booth, trying to figure out the catch. After chatting with the smart people in the booth, it sounded legit, so I signed up!

The image above is taken straight from my console. At face value, it appears that I do have a 100TB cloud drive available to me, so let's see what I can do with it. Before we get to all that, let's get into the product itself.

IDrive e2 is designed as an S3-compatible object storage solution that supposedly offers a more affordable alternative to Amazon S3 while maintaining compatibility with the S3 API. We will get into pricing in a few minutes, so see how true that claim is. Below are some of the key features of IDrive e2

• S3 compatibility, allowing it to work with applications designed for Amazon S3
• No egress fees (the costs typically associated with retrieving your data)
• Global data centers for storing your information (not quite as many regions as AWS, but that is OK.
• No egress fees (the costs typically associated with retrieving your data). Yes, I put this here twice, as this is HUGE. If true

According to the IDrive website, they have over 4 million customers, with over 500 petabytes of data. It's not clear how many of these customers are leveraging E2 (S3 compatible)

One of the first things I look for when testing out a new service is how easy it is to contact support. Don't hit me with a crappy chat bot that will reguritate a knowledgebase article I have already gone through. Thankfully, IDrive publishes phone numbers, where you can talk to a human (I called)

If, like me you like to RTFM before contacting support, there are a bag load of support articles and knowledge base articles available. There is also a massive library of technical documents relating to how to leverage the S3 API - let's face it, if you are using an S3-compatible service, you have to dig into the weeds sometimes!

Speed and Power

It's great to have over 100TB of storage available to me, however, it's useless if I cannot get the data onto the platform promptly, so let's see how quickly we can add and remove data from the platform. Before we get into that, a handy speed test on the IDrive website speed testcompares speeds against AWS S3, Backblaze, and Wasabi. Below is a screenshot of the speed test that I ran. It's worth noting that I ran the test in an airport lounge, on shared wifi, at questionable speed.

So, is this legit, or skewed in favour of IDrive themselves? On that same wifi connection, I uploaded a single zip file that was approximately 500 MB. It took approximately 56 seconds, so quite reasonable.

So, uploading seems to be OK - how about download? Well, let me download that same file on this sketchy wifi. Annoyingly, the uploader/downloader does now show the actual speed of the transfer. But you can see that the 500MB file would download in approx 2 mins, which is quite respectable.

Now, testing from yet another shared wifi (I miss my home gigabit internet), here are the results. This is from a hotel near the Toronto airport.

As you can see, it all looks good. All told, the Idrive e2 service really looks to be the real deal, which is why I have labelled this post as part one.

Look for a part two follow up once I have had more time with the service.