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

Once upon a time, Kenneth Porter shiva@sewingwitch.com said:

I'm using BackupPC to do rsync-based backups of all my systems. The "incremental" backups look only at size and timestamp changes. The less-frequent "full" backups checksum all my files. That means an extra write for every file that gets checked.

Well, not really. atime writes would get batched just like any other write, and filesystems have inode metadata grouped together, so it'd be more like one flush of a few inode metadata blocks for a whole lot of atime updates.

Unless you had zero other writes (in which case, why back up), this will still be lost in the noise of total writes. Any old SSD will handle that just fine for many years to come.