So I had to go look up noatime. Here's what I found: "Linux [and presumably Mac OS X] has a special mount option for file systems called noatime that can be ad

So I had to go look up noatime. Here's what I found: "Linux [and presumably Mac OS X] has a special mount option for file systems called noatime that can be added to each line that addresses one file system in the /etc/fstab file. If a file system has been mounted with this option, reading accesses to the file system will no longer result in an update to the atime information associated with the file like we have explained above. The importance of the noatime setting is that it eliminates the need by the system to make writes to the file system for files which are simply being read. Since writes can be somewhat expensive, this can result in measurable performance gains. Note that the write time information to a file will continue to be updated anytime the file is written to." (http://tldp.org/LDP/solrhe/Securing-Optimizing-Linux-RH-Edition-v1.3/chap6sec73.html http://tldp.org/LDP/solrhe/Securing-Optimizing-Linux-RH-Edit...). stcredzero, I'm curious to see how you set up your partitions to take advantage of noatime.