Backblaze Publishes Q1 2026 Cloud Storage Performance Results
StorageReview, Thursday, April 2nd, 2026
Backblaze has published its Q1 2026 Performance Stats report, a quarterly series comparing cloud storage performance across Backblaze B2, AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, and Wasabi Object Storage. The report covers testing in US-East and EU-Central and includes both the results and the methodology used, with the stated goal of letting others review, reproduce, and compare the findings. As with any vendor-produced benchmark, the data comes from the company running the tests, so the results should be read with that context in mind.
Backblaze says its early Q1 2026 testing showed faster average upload and download times in US-East for most providers and file sizes than in Q4 2025, while results in EU-Central followed a different pattern. The data also showed wider variation in sustained throughput than in average transfer times, especially in multithreaded tests, and Backblaze noted that some of its own larger-file throughput tests hit rate limits, which it disclosed in the methodology update.
Backblaze Cloud Storage Performance Results Q1 2026: US-East
US-East was one of two regions included in Backblaze's Q1 2026 testing, alongside EU-Central. The upload test measures average time, in milliseconds, to upload files of 256KiB, 2MiB, and 5MiB, using averages collected across a month. Lower times indicate better results. Based on Backblaze's test data, Backblaze B2 posted the lowest average upload time for 256KiB files at 7.08 ms and for 5MiB files at 87.62 ms, while Wasabi recorded the lowest result for 2MiB files at 56.74 ms.