what about the 'noatime' flag on a hard drive. it stops each file read being recorded on the disk. you just add noatime to your /etc/fstab: /dev/hda12 / ext3 noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1 i haven't had any problems with it, although its been suggested that it might make data harder to recover in a crash (what are back ups for). sam