CentOS - Feb 2022 - Any downside to mount -o noatime?

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.

Also, is there a way to make noatime the default for all mounts? Or will 
I need to add it to everything in /etc/fstab and 
/etc/systemd/system/*.mount?

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.


-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader