No 'noatime' support in OS X?

R

rbuenger

Registered
Now after I've got my second harddisk that should be used for dumb data storage with a lot of read/write access I would like to enable the noatime option for this volume.

But i noticed that this option seams to be silently discarded by the mount command.

For example if I try this the noatime is just ignored:
Code: 
root# mount -uvo noatime,nosuid /dev/disk1s10
/dev/disk1s10 on /Volumes/media (local, nosuid)

Anyone know if its possible to 'activate' the noatime option for a volume in OS X? Or has Apple removed support for this too?

If this is the case then 10.3.6 was the last piece of software here. They removed so many usefull things that you have to compile your own kernel to get these things back.

Ok, I know that most users even don't know what this is and maybe it's more important to add the latest OpenGL feature for all those gamers but Apple should remember why they are still alive. If they forget the 'power' users and change OS X into a stupid OS for gamers then I can just save $1000 and get a new (better, faster) pc with a REAL BSD OS :mad:
 
How are you trying to enable it and what are you trying to do at the same time?
It is completely possible with Mac OS X (no need to go X86 yet!). A quick google search for Mac OS X noatime runs up quite a few pages where people are doing it onn bootable iPods and to preserve the life of Flash Drives so it is technically possible...
 
Why is noatime necessary? Does it bring better performance or significantly increase the life-span of your hard drive?
 
I won't say that it is a significant boost but yes it will give you a better performance if you read/write a lot especially in small files and the life-span is (maybe) increased as the head movement is decreased.

And there is absolutly no need to save the last access time for these files so it's just a waste of time to let the system write these useless part of information.

But I won't try enabling this with the main system partition as I don't know if OS X need the access information to handle important stuff like caches or whatever. But enabling this for an additional storage partition should be no problem.

Normally you can enable it using the /etc/fstab or just with a mount update. But this doesn't work for me with 10.3.6 :(
 
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