Ok, it's been a long time, but I'll still answer my question with the best option I found as of now.
The best way is to create a udev rule, associated with some scripts (that will create / remove directories and mount / unmount removable devices), and attached to partition udev device event type.
1 - Creating add / remove scripts
Add this script storage-automount.sh in /lib/udev/ and set it to executable (sudo chmod +x /lib/udev/storage-automount.sh):
#!/bin/sh # set the mountpoint name according to partition or device name mount_point=$ID_FS_LABEL if [ -z $mount_point ]; then mount_point=$ fi # if a plugdev group exist, retrieve its gid set & it as owner of mountpoint plugdev_gid="$(grep plugdev /etc/group|cut -f3 -d:)" if [ -z $plugdev_gid ]; then gid='' else chown root:plugdev $mount_point gid=",gid=$plugdev_gid" fi # create the mountpoint directory in /media/ (if not empty) if [ -n $mount_point ]; then mkdir -p /media/$mount_point # other options (breaks POSIX): noatime,nodiratime,nosuid,nodev mount -t $ID_FS_TYPE \ -o rw,flush,user,uid=0$gid,umask=002,dmask=002,fmask=002 \ $DEVNAME /media/$mount_point fi Add this script storage-autounmount.sh in /lib/udev/ and set it to executable (sudo chmod +x /lib/udev/storage-autounmount.sh):
#!/bin/sh # set the mountpoint name according to partition or device name mount_point=$ID_FS_LABEL if [ -z $mount_point ]; then mount_point=$ fi # remove the mountpoint directory from /media/ (if not empty) if [ -n $mount_point ]; then umount -l /media/$mount_point rm -R /media/$mount_point fi 2 - Creating the udev rule to attach those scripts to events
And finally, add a udev rule in /etc/udev/rules.d, for instance 85-storage-automount.rules:
ENV=="partition", RUN+="/lib/udev/storage-automount.sh", ENV="/lib/udev/storage-autounmount.sh" And that's it.
Now, when you plug a storage device in, a directory will be created in /media/ according to the partition name (I don't remember but I think it's working with NTFS partitions as well) and your partition will be mounted into it. It's R/W for users if you have a plugdev group on your system. Also, the devices are mounted in synchronous mode in order to limit the risks of data loss in case of hot unplugging.
When the device is removed, it's unmounted and the directory is removed from /media.
Also, the tool to monitor the udev events is udevadm monitor, with options like --env or --property:
$ udevadm monitor --env This is tested and working fine on both Debian and Arch, but probably works on all distributions that rely on udev.