Mapping to 127.0.0.1

Here's a question:

 

If I map a drive to my local machine (for example, to reduce a long
convoluted directory path), do I suffer a performance hit?  Say I map
drive "X" to directory path
"\\127.0.0.1\dir1\anotherdir\yetanother\keepgoing\twomore\finallythere",
is there a lot of overhead whenever I access that folder?  And if so, is
there another way around it?  In Unix, I'd just create a symbolic link.
Is there a similar concept for Windows?

 

Joe