On Fri, Aug 23, 2002 at 09:44:59AM +1200, Bret Comstock Waldow wrote: > > Mounting your filesystems with noatime is a good start; this > > prevents read accesses to files from causing the last accessed time > > from being updated, which is a cause of many disk writes. > > Do you do this routinely, for both AC & battery operation? Or do you > remount with this parameter only when heading off the mains power? I do this routinely. I could remount with noatime only when going off the mains power, and I suppose it wouldn't be hard to put a shell script in /etc/apm/event.d to do this, but I haven't bothered. > There's a lot going on in the system, and I'm new at this, so I wonder > about potential inconsistencies. Are there any concerns, or is this > quite transparent? I assume you've thought (and/or experienced) your > way through these issues. Nothing on the system depends on atime, although sometimes it's useful for the system administrator to see if a particular file is being used. So it's one of those niceties which can be useful on occassion, but which I've decided to forego in the interests of keeping the disks spundown more often. It turns out this can be important even if your laptop is on the AC mains all the time, since many laptop drives aren't rated for 24x7 operation. So allowing your disks to spin down when your laptop isn't being used (even if it's being left on), can be a very good thing in terms of increasing the lifetime of your laptop drives. - Ted
