Pinging before mapping is still a valid option. It will tell you much more quickly that you've got a problem where there is an issue with connectivity. If you've got X drives to map then why wait X minutes retrying a device that you know is not available, especially if the drives map to the same device? If the mapping is never going to finish successfully it serves no purpose other than to delay notifiying your users that you have a problem.

You should absolutely attend to any underlying issues, but if you have kit that you know will regularly be unavailable for various reasons then don't penalise your end users by delaying them for no purpose.

As regards mapping failures when the device *is* responding to pings there is no silver bullet. Just about any really useful tests will be subject to the same delay as the mapping so won't save you anything.

What you can do where drives map to a common device is check the @ERROR value returned - if the error is a timeout then don't bother to try and map and other drives to the same device as it's likely to timeout for them as well. The same goes for printers which map to a common print server.