Is it bad to map network drives in Windows?
Problem
There has been some spirited discussion within our IT department about mapping network drives. In particular, it has been said that mapping network drives is a bad thing and that adding DFS paths or network shares to your (Windows Explorer/Libraries) favorites is a far better solution. Is this the case? Personally I find the convenience of to be better than ', particularly with cmd line and scripting (of course I'm not talking about hard-coded links, naturally!). I have tried searching for pros and cons of mapped network drives, but I haven't seen anything other than 'should the network go down, the drive will be unavailable'. But this is a limitation of any network-accessed storage. I have also been told that mapped network drives poll the network when the network resource is unavailable, however I haven’t found more information on this. Do network drives poll the network any more than a Windows Explorer library/favourite? Wouldn't this still be an issue with other network access mec…
Error Output
z:\folder
Unverified for your environment
Select your OS to check compatibility.
1 Fix
Fix for: Is it bad to map network drives in Windows?
I imagine the strongest reason for not mapping network drives is that the admins don't want to deal with the headaches of maintaining an index of a finite number of drive letters in addition to the network paths. For one, there might be too many commonly-used network shares to assign drive letters to all of them, and in a large organization, not everyone will have access to all the same shares. Share names are also more descriptive and potentially less ambiguous than drive letters (more on the …
Awaiting Verification
Be the first to verify this fix
Sign in to verify this fix