Mount

A device file is mounted into the Virtual File System at the mount point, usually /mnt or /media, so that we don't have to write blocks directly to the device file. Instead, we now have a path in our directory structure, e.g. /home/my_file.txt that corresponds with the data on the disk. And operations on that file are made more convenient by the caching, etc. handled by the file system implementation.

The mount command reads fstab, a system configuration file that contains information about partitions, to determine what to mount.