While it might take a little longer to access your data, you don’t have to manually drill down to it-the system does it for you. Object storage is best for large volumes of data. Think of a directory with millions of sub-directories, which have millions of folders, which have millions of files each. While file storage allows you to locate data very quickly through the hierarchical system, however, that throughput becomes slower and slower the more directories, folders, and files you have to open. Here again, traditional file storage takes the lead. Throughput, or the quantity of data sent or received within a specified amount of time, is the measure of a system’s performance. Object storage, on the other hand, was created with cost efficiency and scalability in mind, and those advantages have typically come at the cost of speed and performance. As long as the system has the path to where the data is located, grabbing it is fast and simple, especially with today’s flash storage solutions. In the case of traditional file vs object storage, it’s file storage for the win in this regard. Latency measures the time it takes for a packet of data to travel across the network. Traditional Object vs File Storage: Key Differencesīesides the vastly different structure and scalability of these two storage types, they have also tended to differ in several other key areas. And then we’ll briefly focus on the advances in today’s latest object and file storage solutions that are beginning to blur the line a bit between the two. In this article, we’ll take a look at the common differences between traditional object and file storage. The hierarchy and pathing of file storage begins to max out at millions of files-while object storage offers near-infinite scaling, to petabytes and beyond. Each stored object has a unique identifier plus detailed metadata that makes it easy to find among potentially billions of other objects.īecause of the differences in structure, file storage and object storage have significantly different capacity to scale. Object storage, on the other hand, is stored in a “flat” address space. To access a stored file, you must follow a specific path to it. File storage is organized into a strict tree-like hierarchy with directories, sub-directories, and so on.

The primary differences between traditional object and file storage have to do with two things: structure and scalability.

Flat file system