… that’s the question.
Joel Olsen recently wrote a blog post about the pros and cons of using Remote Blob Storage (RBS) (formerly know as External Blob Storage – EBS). This post also contains a bunch of links to various resources from Microsoft and other vendors of RBS technology.
The bottom line is, that using RBS can greatly improve performance when working with large documents in SharePoint, while the actual data-size is much lower than storing those documents in the SharePoint content-database.
On the other side RBS is would be the wrong choice, when mostly small documents or listdata is stored in SharePoint, because in this case the overhead of moving the data out of SQL-server and into the filestream is too costly. Back in 2006 Microsoft already published a paper called “To BLOB or Not To BLOB: Large Object Storage in a Database or a Filesystem”, which concludes that files smaller than 256 KB would be best stored in the database, while files larger than 1 MB are most efficiently sored in the filesystem. Everything in between “depends”.