When mapping a drive to a network file system (NFS) share, you can choose to perform either a hard or soft mount.
If you choose the hard mount option, when an application makes a remote procedure call (RPC) to access a file on the mapped drive, and the call times out, Client for NFS will retry the call indefinitely until it succeeds. While this assumes the NFS server is as available as a local (physical) disk drive, it also means that applications accessing files on the mapped drive will stop responding if the NFS server is not responsive or is not running. For this reason, you should be careful when using the hard mount option. You should consider using the hard mount option only if you are running applications that cannot gracefully handle disk-access failure.
If you choose the soft mount option (the default), when an application makes an RPC call to access a file on the mapped drive, and the call times out, Client for NFS will retry the call a fixed number of times. Then, if the NFS server still does not return successfully from the call, it returns an error to the calling application. While this allows applications to resume functioning after attempting to access a mapped drive on a nonresponsive NFS server, it also introduces the risk of data corruption (either in the application or on the remote drive) to incomplete read or write operations.
When you map a drive to an NFS share, and you choose the soft mount option, you can specify the number of retries that Client for NFS will attempt before failing.
When mapping a network drive, regardless of the mount type, Client for NFS will return if it cannot immediately mount the share.