One group within our IT department wants to eliminate all drive mappings from our network and replace them with simple Network Location (UNC) shortcuts. The group claims the drive mappings consume too many resources on the servers and hurt performance. Another group believe the convenience of being able to relocate files as needed and alter the drive mappings through login scripts overrides the resource consumption concern. Does either method, drive mappings or network location shortcuts, have a significant advantage over the other? Is the resource consumption a legitimate concern? I realize that some applications may not be able to handle UNC paths; we will need to deal with that on a case-by-case basis. We have about 500 client PCs each having on average about 5 mapped drive connections. Thanks for your thoughts.
Resource usage of mapped drives versus network location shortcuts
mappeddrivenetwork-shareresourcesunc
Related Topic
- HYPER-V R2 Can not mount ISO from network location (UNC Path)
- Mapped network drives using GPO falsely showing disconnected
- Mapped Network Drive Timeout
- VPN not showing computers in network, but can use UNC path
- Windows Server 2012 – Prompt on accessing network resource from server hosting resource
- “‘Network Drive’ refers to a location that is unavailable” while UNC works
Best Answer
I've never heard of mapped drives taking up any more "resources" than non-mapped drives and we use mapped drives all over the place where I work. I work at a Fortune-5 with thousands of PCs and thousands of Windows servers...
I'd ask them to back their statements up with data. They have any Microsoft KB articles backing up their claims? Their claims don't seem to carry any water with me. A mapped drive, as I understand, does not cause any more or less network I/O overhead; the underlying protocol is still SMB/CIFS.