Headaches with mapped network drives not connecting. Switch to UNC?

[Alex_M]

I've been having some headaches with network drives not being able to reconnect. I've had similar issues before but it was only occasional. Now situation became a bit worse recently - every morning on their first boot up, some PCs in the office (Windows 10 Pro) need to be restarted once before they can access the assets (projects, textures, models, etc.) on the network through the mapped drives. I checked and the network adapters don't have power saving features enabled.

I decided to do some research about this and I was seeing people recommending using UNC instead of mapped network drives due to similar problems. Even the 3ds Max help recommend this:

Whenever possible, use UNC paths instead of mapped drives for rendered output (especially when doing network rendering) and for scene assets, such as bitmap textures, XRef files, .ies files and so forth.

I've always used mapped network drives to access assets on the network but the connection problems I described make it a bit of a pain. What's the pros and cons of UNC vs mapped network drives? Which allows for more flexibility and expandability in the future? What about ease of use and transfer & access speed? Looking forward to some insights. Thanks in advance!

[kosso_olli]

What's the pros and cons of UNC vs mapped network drives? Which allows for more flexibility and expandability in the future? What about ease of use and transfer & access speed? Looking forward to some insights. Thanks in advance!

There are no cons to using UNC. Switch to UNC right now, everything else is just useless. Nearly every problem we had with DR (missing textures and the like) was always related to mapped drives. Switched to UNC and the problems went away. The transfer speed is not affected by this.

[Morbid Angel]

Windows has a bug, where in certain conditions the mapped drive cannot be mapped. This bug is present since windows xp until 10. What I do is run a cmd script during boot / login which maps the drive. The issue is the workstation service (in services) is not properly initialized sometimes upon login which prevents windows to map the drive. Restarting workstation service would effectively fix that issue (from windows support). But some times the workstation service enters a loop which prevents it from shutting down and so the only solution is to reboot. I found that some times if you logout and log back in, its enough to remap the drive but its def pain in the ass.

Unc can work but there might be a different problem with credentials not being saved permanently so you might have to enter login info every time you try to access the network machine which is another windows bug and another pain in the ass

[joconnell]

+1 - we had issue with drive mappings on windows going to sleep after a while on render nodes so we got lots of errors in frames or hangs while deadline was missing things. Swap to UNC and it's all good.

[kosso_olli]

Unc can work but there might be a different problem with credentials not being saved permanently so you might have to enter login info every time you try to access the network machine which is another windows bug and another pain in the ass

This is no issue at all, when the user account on the render nodes has permanent permission to access the network locations. We never had any issues with UNC, there is no way around it.

[Morbid Angel]

This is no issue at all, when the user account on the render nodes has permanent permission to access the network locations. We never had any issues with UNC, there is no way around it.

How do you setup a permanent permission? I never heard of it