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Question from which this arose is here: What does it mean to mount something?

Since asking about which is "better" or which "worse" can lead to subjective and argumentative answers, I'd like to know about the technical differences between the two.

Community
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Mussnoon
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2 Answers2

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Basic technical differences between Unix mounting (single tree) and Windows drive letters (multi forested):

  1. The Unix root file system allows for other file system to be placed inside it, giving it a branched structure from a single point.
  2. The Windows drives allow for multiple root file systems, but don't allow any other file system inside.
  3. Each Unix mount point has group/owner/all permissions for reading, writing and access.
  4. Unix mount points can be removed and added through commands, including reading to custom locations for testing and fixing.
  5. Windows drives have a natural list of available partitions/drives which is easily visible from the desktop and reflected directly in the file system structure.
  6. There is a fixed limit to the number of drive letters available in windows, there s no such limit to unix mounting.
  7. Network mounting is transparent and files from the network are placed in a location specific for the client machine.
  8. Unix mounting allows for fusefs which provides interesting access to data. Generative folders which are not possible unless you have unix like mounting.
  9. In unix A drive can be mounted into a specific location according to the booting operating system. In one os on the same machine a partition may be mounted to /media/backup and in another os it might be mounted to /home/
  10. Any part of your operating system's files can be put onto their own mount. Either a different partition, disk or even network or cloud storage mounts. This enables thin clients to load their operating system from the network (nfs).
  11. The chroot process allows you to change the root in a unix file system an effectively swap out the running system for a new one, without restarting. This is impossible with drive letters as they're all pre-assigned.

This isn't an exhaustive list and may need to be cleaned up in the future.

Martin Owens -doctormo-
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mount is just terminology. It has long roots and it ended up staying until today. Other obscure terms are patch (software patch, that changes the main software in a small way so as to fix a problem) which comes from the clothing industry. Or bug, a generic software defect, that comes from an actual bug that short-circuited the circuits of the first ever computers. Or daemon to describe a system service.

When the original software was developed there was no market as we have today, so the codewords that the programmers chose ended up reaching the end-users.

Currently there is a process to remove these awkward words with more neutral and descriptive terms. For example, instead of daemon, we have service.

Desktop environments such as GNOME are in the process of removing these obscure terms.

Update: And to answer your question, all operating systems perform this task. It's just you got exposed to mount which might have confused you.

user4124
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