I've got an external harddrive that I'd like to auto-mount. It will be present most times when my laptop boots. Where is the correct place to mount it?/media/my-hd: Will litter /media with an empty folder when the hard-drive was not mounted./mnt/my-hd: I've heard that /mnt itself is supposed to be used as a temporary mount point. This happens, for example, during the Arch installation process.
Where should I mount my external harddrive?
arch linux;mount;conventions
The recommendation in the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard is that /media contains subdirectories for mount points of removable media. There are two conflicting traditions about /mnt: some consider it a mount point, whereas others consider it a directory for mount points. The FHS requests that distributions leave /mnt alone, so that the administrator can do what they like with it, and set up mount points under /media. System installation is a special case: it's a dedicated system, so it doesn't need to worry about competing conventions.If you use an automounting script (such as an udev rule as suggested by jasonwryan   see How to get my USB key to auto mount), it can take care of creating the mount point. But there's no harm in having the mount point all the time.