[PLUG] Using 'noatime' in fstab?

[JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org>]

I read someplace that you can reduce wear and tear on hard drives by 
including noatime in the mount options.  I already do this for the one 
system I have using a CF card, but I was wondering about it just in general.

I have several servers that rsync themselves various places for backups. 
That means that every time I rsync the entire filesystem, a gazillion 
atimes are being updated for essentially no reason.  Ditto for the 
s/locate indexer.  I can't recall ever using an atime for anything 
(ctime and mtime yes, atime no).

Can anyone give me a good reason not to do this on some/all of my 
machines?  All of my machines are ext3, some have H/W EIDE RAID, others 
have software (MDM) mirroring, some are just plain old hard drives, if 
it matters.  Most are Debian or Ubuntu but I have a couple of CentOS4 
boxes too.  And what about for machines in a VM?

Thanks,
JP
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP            |:::======|        jp{at}jpsdomain{dot}org
My Account, My Opinions     |=========|      http://www.jpsdomain.org/
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"Microsoft Tax" = the additional hardware & yearly fees for the add-on
software required to protect Windows from its own poorly designed and
implemented self, while the overhead incidentally flattens Moore's Law.
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