What's the most "correct" mount point for a permanent NTFS partition?
First and foremost, this is going to depend solely on your architecture, and customs.
I for instance mount things like this under /mnt. I know people that create top level directories, and people who put this stuff in /home. It all depends on what you're comfortable with. There is no distinct standard on this anymore, the architecture of the system has changed, and you have varying views now, on things that used to be 'gospel'. Things like /usr/local or /opt/share, rpm or source...you get the drift.
Secondly, if you re-read through your link at pathname.com, you'll notice the paragraph under /media that states
Rationale
Historically there have been a number of other different places used to mount removeable media such as /cdrom, /mnt or /mnt/cdrom. Placing the mount points for all removeable media directly in the root directory would potentially result in a large number of extra directories in /. Although the use of subdirectories in /mnt as a mount point has recently been common, it conflicts with a much older tradition of using /mnt directly as a temporary mount point.
So personally, I advocate /mnt/windows or some iteration of that. It keeps the top level dir free, and is simple and intuitive. When I'm looking through or auditing a system, that's where I look for mounts right off the bat.
I don't think there is a problem with creating a new toplevel directory for permanent mounts. That's done pretty frequently. I use /ntfs for this same purpose.
One potential issue with a top-level mount would be a program that stats all the files in a directory. ls -l /
or even a colorized ls as is often turned on will have to call stat()
on all files under root and if the NFS server is hanging, it can cause ls to hang as well. A simple ls without color does not invoke stat()
. This is the reason I most often put somewhere under /mnt
. I will still sometimes mount NFS under /
such as when home directories are available over NFS.
I also would not use /media
for any static mounts. It's a part of HAL and is used for dynamically mounting devices such as when a USB flash drive is inserted and all directories under /media
are managed by HAL/udev.
Ultimately, the final destination comes down to policy. If the server is reasonably reliable, there's nothing wrong with putting it under /
or creating a new tree such as /server1/music
and /server1/video
for mounts. I tend to like the idea of keeping NFS mounts under /mnt
with exceptions only for mounts like /home
, but that's my policy.