Are there any reasons you don't see people mounting external file shares to a folder in Windows?

Question

It's clearly possible mount an external file share to a folder as you would in Linux using sshfs, in Windows, but I haven't really seen anyone do this. The only potential downsides to this I can think of have to do with end users who don't know that the folder is really a mapped drive, and that if you're copying files off of an entire system you have to make sure your command compensates to not copy the junction folder's contents.

After my boss diagnosed a remote user's laptop yesterday with a mapped drive not appearing because the printer had mapped to that drive letter without letting anything but the Disk Management console know about it, I'm starting to think it's a better idea to avoid situations like these using a better way.

Aside from those, are there any other potential downsides to this?

Answer 1

Windows has a hard limit on the number of shared connections. And its not based on the number of users connected but on the number of connections everybody makes. This not only includes the mapped drives but printers as well. I don't know about Windows 10, but for Windows 7 the limit was 20 concurrent connections and earlier versions of windows had less.

But the setup is good if you have few users.

My personal preference when setting this up is to completely disable cache in the shared folder. Because (1) less network consumption and (2) safer version control. You can also set permissions on who has Write/Copy/Execute permissions.

Here's a link on the number of concurrent connections

Answer 2

The two main reasons i dont use shares as folders under drive C:\ are for performance reasons.

1) Drive indexing 2) AV File scans

Imagine the performance hit if you did that across the wire instead of hitting a local spindle on local bus speeds...