Question : Mapped Drive vs UNC Performance Differences?

Is there any performance benefit to using Mapped Drives vs UNC paths?

I'm looking to see if there is less network or resource overhead to using a mapped drive in Windows vs a UNC path that may re-authenticate between calls.

Any documentation to back this up?

Answer : Mapped Drive vs UNC Performance Differences?

"Mapped drives show better read performance than UNC paths at request sizes of 64KB and above. Where our mapped drive ran at near disk-speed with large requests, UNC reads dropped to the one and two MB per second range. As the request size increased, the throughput decreased. Interestingly, mapped drives showed good performance at large request sizes, however additional depth caused throughput to decrease. Overall, a depth of two seemed to be the optimum value for both UNC and mapped drives, reading and writing. For good performance, drives should be mapped rather than accessed using their UNC paths."

Ref:

http://research.microsoft.com/BARC/Sequential_IO/Win2K_IO_MSTR_2000_55.doc