Another scenario we've not gone over so far is automatically mounting filesystems when your system is booted. A great example of this is adding a secondary hard disk. As your needs grow, adding more fixed storage may make sense. Your author, for example, recently added a new hard disk to his PC due to the fact that so many virtual machines were installed, and there was no room for them on the primary hard drive. In this example, a secondary hard disk offers the benefit of segregating virtual hard disks onto their own dedicated storage. Another example may include setting up a secondary hard drive for a backup program to use. While another hard drive inside the same physical PC is not technically considered a backup (one good power surge or a fire could render all hard drives inside the same case useless), it's still better than nothing.

It's important to note that it's not required to ensure that secondary storage is mounted at boot as you can always...