Have we ever gotten a consensus verdict on whether noatime should be set for SSDs or not?
I just received my OWC SSD and installed it today . . .and the speed improvement on my 2008 Core 2 Duo Unibody MBP is pretty breathtaking. Following advice gleaned from macintouch.com and from Fredrik Poller at http://poller.se/2010/08/optimizing-mac-os-x-for-ssd-drives/ I went ahead and disabled hibernation (actually I had already disabled it on my spinning drive). Although the article recommends disabling the sudden motion sensor for SSDs as it does no good for them . . .disabling it doesn't really provide any benefit so I left that alone . . .although I suppose that monitoring it for any sudden motion activity might suck up a few cpu cycles but I doubt it would be noticeable. The article further recommends setting noatime to prevent excessive writes to the drive. The comments to the article (and related discussions on macintouch) argue both for and against the reduction in SSD write-life caused by using atime instead of noatime. Both the pro noatime and pro atime crowd make reasonably convincing arguments for their case and claim they're right (imagine that). I can't really see any logic flaws in either argument despite reading through them several times. So what's the real deal with atime vs noatime? Having the file modified date changed just because you modified the file has always seemed kinda hokey to me . . .in my view I've always thought that a modification date should reflect the date a file was changed and I've never really considered an access a change . . .although I can also see the argument that one might want to track accesses as well. Trying to perform an eyeball integration of the various positions . . .what it comes down to me is that there is a potential write life lowering if you leave atime on . . .but that even granted the theoretical existence of that possibility the actual user effect is either significant or not depending on whether you agree with the wear leveling portions of the relevant pro/con arguments. Beyond that . . .it seems like one should keep atime if you care about file accesses being tracked . . .or use noatime if you don't care about them and want only actual modifications to the files to be tracked. So . . .is there any really convincing argument for or against the write life argument (at least more convincing than what my research to date has shown me . . .which is that it depends on who you ask) . . .and is the effect significant enough to use noatime? Conversely . .is the whole write life argument right up there with arguing about whether mailing list software should strip extra addresses out or not and you should just use atime or noatime depending on what you want tracked? ----------------------------------------------- There are only three kinds of stress; your basic nuclear stress, cooking stress, and A$$hole stress. The key to their relationship is Jello. neil _______________________________________________ MacOSX-admin mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-admin
