What is the practical use of mounted drives

phdillard

Hello all. I'm studying for my A+ and am to the point in the Exam Cram that discusses mounted drives. I get the concept of mounting drive and removing them, but I don't understand why someone would need to do this. The example in the book is the DVD drive being mounted to a folder on the HDD, but why? What practical purposes does this serve?

instant000

For example, if you add additional storage to your system, you can mount it to a folder (some call these mountpoints). A practical use of it is as a way to attach other storage to your system.

If you're familiar with windows, you have a device manager, and it contains a tree of devices on your system.
In 'nix type of operating systems, devices are added to the file tree, and they'll be represented by some sub-folder of root (often expressed as '/').

This would probably make a lot more sense to you if you had a UNIX background, as this is how it works with devices, by basically mounting them to folders.

I don't regularly use MACs, but I remember a few years ago I got on one, and I seem to remember a mount-like operation that I had to perform, since it was based on 'nix.

Hope this helps.

phdillard

So it can allow access to storage space on a different HDD or secondary/extended partition via the mount point, thus negating the need for content in that specific folder to be stored in the primary HDD or partition?

it_consultant

In windows you rarely mount a drive against a folder, sometimes you will, for example if your SQL cluster requires more drives than the US alphabet has letters, you have to mount the drive - or in Hyper-V clusters, the cluster drives are actually mounted to a consistent folder path within the file systems of the individual hyper-v nodes. In linux, mounting the drives is how you make them accessible to the OS, the root of linux is a bunch of folders instead of drive letters. When you insert a drive you need to mount it in order for linux to be able to use it. In fact, part of being a linux admin is controlling the automatic mounting of file systems at boot:

Learn Linux, 101: Control mounting and unmounting of filesystems

phdillard

So the use of mounted drives is more geared toward Linux than Windows, but is an available feature just in case you run more drives than there are letters?

Asif Dasl

Yeah, it's not a very practical suggestion to mount a DVD to a folder in Windows. But it's more practical to mount a hard drive within a folder structure in Windows. Even then it may not be a great suggestion without me getting too complicated - there are better ways to do it and avoid a single point of failure.

But in linux you mount a DVD to a folder and reference the folder instead of a drive letter. In linux it's the norm.

earweed

In windows you might mount a drive like this in order to increase storage capacity of your current volume. Explained better Mount or dismount a drive here