The Last-Access timestamp (2002)

Last-access time should just die. As explained in the article it is practically useless, and it causes unneeded disk writes, making disks fail sooner.

When installing Linux machine I always remember to add noatime to the mount options if it's not already there. Yes, I do know the default on Linux is "relatime".

The only instances where I've ever even thought about atimes is noticing "noatime" flags on mounted filesystems.

It seems like even creation-times and modification-times took a hit in noteworthiness when home PCs got online and all the files on disk were no longer artefacts of only you and your OEM. What the ctimes and mtimes of stuff downloaded (and unpacked from various compressed formats) ended up being always seemed somewhat unpredictable and trained me to gloss over them during most modes of PC use.

Since they can be disabled via the registery, it's not so much a shortcoming of programmers as a design feature.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff794679(v=winembed...