Tom Pfeifer wrote:
I believe vfat stands for virtual fat (or something along those lines), where you can have long filenames - as opposed to 'msdos' where the filenames are restricted to the 8.3 format. vfat can mount either FAT16 or FAT32 file systems.
Also, specifying the filesystem type isn't necessary; mount can auto-detect it. Though you might choose to, in case the partitions were to change in the future, so mount would give an error instead of mounting a different partition there without telling you. But personally, I don't specify the fs type unless I need to.