Re: [CentOS] Any downside to mount -o noatime?

On Wed, Feb 09, 2022 at 02:09:44PM -0800, Kenneth Porter wrote:

I'd like to reduce the wear-and-tear on my SSDs and eliminate the unnecessary metadata writes on my backup media that only slow down the backup process. So I want to add noatime to all my mounts. Is there any downside to this?

At one time I remember atime being useful for tmpwatch, which removes files in /tmp that haven't been accessed in a week or two. But I can live without that feature.

relatime has been the default for a long time -- that only updates atime once per some reasonable timeperiod. The wear and tear from that is negligible and you can still get a basic idea of when files where accessed.