atimes

Okay... I know I've taught this in classes before when talking about
system tuning, but what are the side effects of turning off
atimes? (using the noatime option when mounting a filesystem)

I've recently been playing around with it, and can't believe the
difference it makes! Have you ever done a `find / --print` and NOT had
the hard drive sound like it's going to rattle out of the computer?

Now, back to my question, what are the side effects of disabling
atimes? Are there any utilities that really need to know the last time a
file was accessed? (which would include the last time someone did
something like a `ls -l`)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=[The Realm of Darkness]=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= O-
 Ken Bowley                                        johann@trod.org
 AKA: Lord Johann                              http://www.trod.org
-=-=-=-=-=[ Linux, the choice of the GNU generation ]=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
LCP, LCI, and Brainbench Linux MVP