This directory contains subdirectories which are used as mount points for removable media such as floppy disks, cdroms and zip disks.
Historically there have been a number of other different places
used to mount removable media such as
the mount points for all removable media directly in the root
directory would potentially result in a large number of extra
/. Although the use of
/mnt as a mount point has
recently been common, it conflicts with a much older tradition of
/mnt directly as a temporary mount point.
The following directories, or symbolic links to directories,
must be in
/media, if the corresponding subsystem
|Floppy drive (optional)|
|CD-ROM drive (optional)|
|CD writer (optional)|
|Zip drive (optional)|
On systems where more than one device exists for mounting a certain type of media, mount directories can be created by appending a digit to the name of those available above starting with '0', but the unqualified name must also exist. 
A compliant distribution with two CDROM drives might have
/media/cdrom a symlink to either of these.