noatime is a great counterexample to your 'ricing' claim. I run this mount option on nearly every filesystem under my command. relatime is also a viable option if you need things like mutt.

From http://kerneltrap.org/node/14148 (which discusses relatime, a less-drastic version of noatime that keeps mutt working)

> Ingo Molnar stressed the significance of fixing this performance issue, "I cannot over-emphasize how much of a deal it is in practice. Atime updates are by far the biggest IO performance deficiency that Linux has today. Getting rid of atime updates would give us more everyday Linux performance than all the pagecache speedups of the past 10 years, _combined_."

> "It's also perhaps the most stupid Unix design idea of all times. Unix is really nice and well done, but think about this a bit: 'For every file that is read from the disk, lets do a ... write to the disk! And, for every file that is already cached and which we read from the cache ... do a write to the disk!'"