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I see cautions about treating network drives as looking like lettered drive. Can you turn it on its head?

So. What are the cautions about mapping a drive to a your-choice-of-name share in the usual way. For example share name "01-D-drive". In file explorer under network (for my local machine) I now have another "neater" more logical way to access my drives (shared with appropriate permissions) that gives me ordering and naming possibilities. Cautions might be raised that the performance is not the same--is it prohibitively expensive? Another step might be to map these "local" shares to a network path so I have top level access in file explorer to the "drives" e.g. define network resource to this local path //my-local-computer/01-D-drive. Where will this break down? Here's an example:

Open share on //my-local-computer to see (and use). --note: lettered drives are still there in file explorer

my-local-computer

01-zdrive

02-any-name-any-order

03-hey-system-drive-should-not-be-shared

04-why-not?

don't want to open share (surely even more overhead??) and reference in c

//my-local-computer/01-zdrive

etc, etc and so forth. this silly editor is trashing my paragraphs--try adding a blank line

dave boyd
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1 Answers1

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There's very little overhead in using the redirector to access local UNC shares instead of local drives. I don't think you'll see a difference in either throughput or latency.

PS: After actually testing this, there is quite a difference. Throughput is very close but latency (open file, dir scan, or recursive traversal) is much slower:

dir /s on 2012R2 file server, 20,000 dirs, 61,000 files:

local drive letter: 3 s

UNC share: 43 s

Zac67
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  • Just what is asked -- Thanks for the work! This is therefore only useful unless you get further usefulness from sharing your drives to other computers. Thinking more clearly most of the other benefits can be achieved by renaming the disks and hiding the drive letters to achieve sorting by disk name. – dave boyd Jul 01 '17 at 18:25