I never contemplated needing 30 or 40 volumes (I seldom have more than 10) but I also never thought a modern OS would have a limitation so low as that either. If you’d asked me I’d have guessed there was some parameter that was 2 to the xth that was allocated for how many volumes can be concurrently addressed and that it was probably 4096 or 65535 or something.
Thank you for answering a long standing question. I find this mind-boggling, but unfortunately I am not on their bug triage committee.
Sure they do. It’s very convenient if you need to browse the drive with Explore.
I hate memorizing the drive path. I keep several mapped that I use regularly.
Just to make this clear, Windows is not limited to 26 local volumes. I don’t know what the limit is, but I imagine it’s pretty big. It’s just that only 26 of them can have optional drive letters, that being the size of the alphabet. The 26-letter alphabet is a widely-observed standard that even Microsoft comply with ;).
So drive letters are a sort of shortcut mechanism, over and above the other ways of accessing volumes which are more like other OSes, i.e., mount the volume within an exisiting filesystem, or use a big ugly string to identify the actual device.
As for using drive letters as shortcuts to remote shares, obviously you can also create desktop shortcuts rather than drive letters. But they tend to be not so well supported by applications-- the file open dialog might not immediately show those kind of shortcuts but the drive letters will always be close at hand.