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) Favourites is a far better solution.

Why is this the case?

Personally I find the convenience of z:\folder to be better than \\server\path\folder', 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. Wouldn't this still be an issue with other network access mechanisms (that is, mapped Favourites) whenever Windows tries to enumerate the file system (for example, when a file/folder picker dialog is opened)?

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Do network drives poll the network any more than a Windows Explorer library/favourite?