In an unbound grid that stores data in the GridControl.Data object, then setting the value using grid.SetCellInfo with the proper flags set, or directly accessing grid.Data[row, col] as below, will avoid events and perform 5-10 faster that just directly indexing the GridControl.
GridStyleInfo style = null;
if(grid.Data[row, col] != null
{
style = new GridStyleInfo(grid.Data[row, col]);
}
else
{
style = new GridStyleInfo();
}
style.Text = "something";
grid.Data[row, col] = style.Store;