Bill Baer has released a great overview of shredded storage, highlighting how different storage strategies evolved from SharePoint Portal Server 2001 on to present day:

From http://blogs.technet.com/b/wbaer/archive/2013/09/17/overview-of-shredded-storage-in-sharepoint-2013.aspx
“Shredded Storage is a new storage model implementation in SharePoint Server 2013 used to provide smoother I/O patterns, improve data transfer performance, and reduce storage utilization when using historical versions with SharePoint.

This whitepaper provides a background of SharePoint products storage evolution and the implementation specifics and benefits of Shredded Storage in SharePoint 2013.

Download: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39719

Some key FAQ’s:

Can Shredded Storage be disabled? 
No, Shredded Storage is enabled by default and cannot be disabled.

Does Shredded Storage work with Remote BLOB Storage (RBS)? 
Yes, Shredded Storage works with Remote BLOB Storage.

Can I prevent a file from being shredded? 
No, Shredded Storage cannot be disabled.

Is BLOB data shredded when I upgrade to SharePoint 2013?  
No.  BLOB data is not partitioned until that data has been accessed and saved back to the server.

Are there any changes to IOP requires? 
No.  The published I/O recommendations for SharePoint 2010 are applicable to SharePoint 2013.  For capacity planning information see also Capacity planning for SharePoint Server 2013.

Does Shredded Storage work with 3rd party RBS Providers? 
Yes.  Shredded Storage is compatible with 3rd-party RBS Providers.