Check out this useful tutorial from roy_1000 on instructables:

We add a line entry to /etc/fstab when Raspberry Pi needs to automatically mount a network drive. The problem with this approach is that:

Raspberry Pi needs to mount the network drive from the point of when booting up to shutting down. In other words, Raspberry Pi has to use CPU and RAM to keep the mount going all the time even when network drive is not needed. This incurs unnecessary expense on the Raspberry Pi.

To avoid the problem above, we don’t use /etc/fstab. Instead, we manually mount a network drive, we use the mount command. The problem with using the mount command is that the user executing the mount must be ROOT user. However, only one user can be ROOT.

To avoid the ROOT user requirement, you can configure sudo settings to let every other users use the mount. The problem with this approach is that we have to constantly update sudo settings every time we add new users or remove existing ones. You incur administrative cost.

Read more.

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