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I have been adding a lot of different drivers to our WDS server since my company has been deploying a ton of different hardware recently. Instead of manually downloading and picking through drivers to find the right ones, I would like to just use those all-inclusive driver packs (from the manufacturer, of course).

When I find myself about to add these large driver packs to my WDS server, they can be upwards of 700-800 INF files to load.

My question is, obvious organizational disadvantages aside, is there a downside to adding all of those drivers? I am guessing many of those drivers won't even be used when deploying an image, so are they hurting anything?

I've searched on this site, superuser, google, etc. and I have found plenty on the actual process of doing this, but not really much on best practices. Any insight is appreciated!

Callen L
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I think install time goes up as all the drivers have to be checked for relevance, but I would consider this to be a minhor inconvenience compared to the ability for drivers to JUST WORK.

TomTom
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There is one thing to watch out for and that is to add all drivers to the WinPE boot images. I made this mistake and it dramatically slows down the deployment process.

When using the driver groups, you can filter which clients can access the driver groups. see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd759191.aspx In my current environment I have all drivers for my 20 different models in driver groups but I did not specify any filters yet. I did however specify to distribute only drivers matching client hardware. So far I have not expierienced any issues with this setup.

JT van Dorp
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