NFS was developed at a time when we weren’t able to share our drives like we are able to today — in the Windows environment. It offers the ability to share the hard disk space of a big server with many smaller clients. Again,this is a client/server environment.
While this seems like a standard service to offer, it was not always like this. In the past, clients and servers were unable to share their disk space.Thin clients have no hard drives and thus need a “virtual” hard-disk. The NFS mount their hard disk from the server and, while the user thinks they are saving their documents to their local (thin client) disk, they are in fact saving them to the server. In a thin client environment, the root, usr and home partitions are all offered to the client from the server via NFS.