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Depending on your needs, the options included with defaults may or may not be 
ideal. Instead, you can call the options out individually, separated by commas, 
choosing only the ones you need. For example, with regards to 
rw
, you may not want 
users to be allowed to change the content. In fact, I strongly recommend that you use 
ro
 (read-only) instead unless your users have a very strong use case for needing to 
make changes to files. I've actually learned this the hard way, where I've experienced 
an entire volume getting completely wiped out (and no one admitted to clearing 
the contents). This volume included some very important company data. From that 
point on, I mandated 
ro
 being used for everything, with a separate 
rw
 mount created, 
with only a select few (very responsible) people having access to it.
The 
exec
 option may also not be ideal. For example, if your volume is intended for 
storing files and backups, you may not want scripts to be run from that location. By 
using the inverse of 
exec
 (
noexec
), you can prevent scripts from running to create a 
situation where users are able to store files on the volume but not execute programs 
that are stored there.
Another option worth explanation is 
auto
. The 
auto
 option basically tells your 
system to automatically mount that volume whenever the system boots or when you 
enter the following command:
sudo mount -a
When executed, 
sudo mount -a
 will mount any entry in your 
/etc/fstab
 file that 
has the 
auto
 option set. If you've used 
defaults
 as an option for the mount, those 
will be mounted as well since 
defaults
 implies 
auto
. This way, you can mount all 
filesystems that are supposed to be mounted without rebooting your server (this 
command is safe to run whenever, as it will not disrupt anything that is already 
mounted).
The opposite of the 
auto
 option is 
noauto
, which can be used instead. As you can 
probably guess by the name, an entry in 
fstab
 with the 
noauto
 option will not be 
automatically mounted and will not be mounted when you run 
mount -a
. Instead, 
entries with this option will need to be mounted manually.
You may be wondering, then, what the point is of including an entry in 
/etc/fstab
 
just to use 
noauto
, which kind of seems to defeat the purpose. To explain this better, 
here is an example 
fstab
 entry with 
noauto
 being used:
UUID=e51bcc9e-45dd-45c7 /mnt/ext_disk  ext4  rw,noauto 0 0

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Managing Storage Volumes