The new G4 MacMini with the SSD is running beautifully. However, there is one little detail I’d like to take care of to help prolong the life of the SSD: disable the atime updating in the file system.
When we build out Linux servers, one of the configuration changes we always make is to add a noatime flag to the mount options for the file systems. atime is the Last Access Timestamp and really is useless in a server environment.
After some empirical testing…..
Under Tiger:
# mount -uvw -o noatime /
/dev/disk0s3 on / (local, journaled)
no effect. Even produced this entry in the system.log:
Jan 8 14:19:27 vpn KernelEventAgent[34]: tid 00000000 received
unknown event (256)
Leopard:
# mount -vuw -o noatime /
/dev/disk4 on / (hfs, local, journaled, noatime)
where it looks to be supported…
The test is to check the last access time with a ls -lu , then simply cat the file, then ls -lu again.
—
I guess I’ll need to upgrade the Mini to Leopard Server!