Pros and Cons of using Shredded Storage

How to Enable\Disable Shredded Storage - Shredded Storage is enabled by default. It can be enabled or disabled on a Web application and Site level. At Web application level you can enable\disable by setting FileOperationSettings property of the Web Service member of the web application.

SPWebService.FileOperationSettings property according to MSDN “Gets or sets a Boolean value that specifies whether all Webs should do direct to shredded store.”

This property can be set to 3 possible settings:

UseWebSetting (=0)
AlwaysDirectToShredded (=1)
NeverDirectToShredded (=2)

Pros of using Shredded Storage -

1. Shredded Storage Improves the I/O performance - In SharePoint 2010 in order to save the changes to a document or let’s say add a new version of a document, the original file is first read from the database server by the Web Server(WFE) and then it merges the document with Changes. The file is then sent back to the database server for storage. In this process results in a large amount of network traffic between the WFE and the database server.
In SharePoint 2013 however, when a Client updates a file, only the shredded BLOB that corresponds to the change is updated. This update occurs on the database server as opposed to the Web server(WFE) thus reducing huge network traffic and Improving File IO Operations.

2. Reduce Storage with Document Versioning - With changes only being saved as “Changed Blobs” and not the entire document with the changes as new version, Shredded Storage helps save a lot of storage space and lowers the amount of storage required for storing files that are available in SharePoint.

3. Microsoft Office 2013 is not required for Shredded Storage to work - any version of Office which accesses files via the DAV or the FSSHTTP protocol will benefit from this.

4. Supports any File Formats – Shredded Storage not only apply to Microsoft Office file formats - any file format stored on SharePoint 2013 servers which is edited/updated by end users will benefit from Shredded Storage.

Cons of using Shredded Storage -

1. Shredded storage is a per document feature. So if two copies of the exactly same document is stored in two different libraries, these two documents will still have their own set of shreds which will take up twice the space of each individual document.