Hi,

The gold or master image is actually not utilized by the linked clone desktops so there won't be any performance impact there.
When you deploy a linked clone pool via View Composer, a full replica VM is generated (you'll see this in VC) based off of the gold VM snapshot and all desktops are anchored to the replica VM, NOT the gold image.
A replica VM will always exist on the same datastore as the OS disks.
For example, if you are deploying your pool across multiple datastores eg. Datastore1 and Datastore2, you will have 2 replica VM's (1 on each datastore) and the OS disks will be anchored to their respective replica VM.
Hope this helps.

Regards,
Michael