Every "mount my NAS in Explorer" guide starts with Map Network Drive, and most of them stop right there. The trap is that what Windows gives you in that dialog is not actually a drive.
Three things you only discover after hitting the wall:
Network location, not volume. The share shows up in the Explorer tree, but anything that enumerates volumes — backup agents, imaging tools, older installers, some indexers — never sees it. If you have ever watched a backup tool cheerfully report "no such drive" for files you can plainly see, this is why.
No LOCK/UNLOCK. The built-in WebDAV client does not implement WebDAV locking, so applications that lock files (Office among them) treat the file as read-only or fail outright. Editors that write temp files next to the original also misbehave in ways that are hard to diagnose.
Path length. The legacy client keeps the 260-character limit and URL-encodes non-ASCII names, so a folder called "项目资料" can push a path over the edge even when the path looks short.
And there is a TLS surprise that catches people out: servers that work perfectly over SMB can fail outright with the Windows WebDAV client, because it negotiates a narrower cipher set than modern servers offer. On my own test box, an endpoint only started connecting after I forced TLS 1.3 with ECDHE cipher suites — a reverse proxy in front of the server "fixed" it instantly, which sent me chasing the wrong thing for an afternoon.
So what actually works?
- SMB mapped by the OS. For a LAN this is the default and the right answer: native, no third-party driver, no path limits.
-
A kernel-mode mount (WinFsp is the usual base on Windows). It registers an actual drive letter, implements locking, keeps a local write cache, caches credentials, and resumes cleanly after a dropped connection. This is what you want when legacy software insists on
X:\....
How to tell which one you need: if a human is moving files around, the sync client your NAS vendor ships is usually enough. If a program has to read and write at a stable path, you need a real volume, not a shortcut in the tree.
A three-point test you can run against any candidate mount before committing: does it show up in Disk Management as a volume; can an app that opens a file exclusively (Office, a database, an installer) write to it; does it survive a dropped connection and re-sync without corrupting the local copy. Most "it works for me" demos fail point two.
Full disclosure: I work on ScsDriver, a WinFsp-based WebDAV/NAS mount for Windows — $5.50 for a lifetime license (one-time purchase, not a subscription), with a 7-day trial if you want to check it against that three-point test. It is not the right tool for every setup: if SMB works for you, use SMB.
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