A distributed file system is provided having multi-stream object-based data upload. A distributed file system comprises a plurality of client processing nodes, wherein one or more of the plurality of client processing nodes selectively operate in one or more of an object-based mode and a POSIX-style mode; and a plurality of storage nodes, wherein one or more of the plurality of client processing nodes transfer multiple portions of the same data entity (e.g., an object or a file) substantially simultaneously to one or more of the storage nodes. A uniform interface is optionally provided to access the object-based mode and the POSIX-style mode. The multiple portions of the same data entity comprise blocks and multiple blocks can be committed substantially simultaneously in parallel. Committed data containing an error that was uploaded using the object-based mode becomes unavailable for further object-based access until the error is repaired using the POSIX-style mode.