I suspect it has something to do with NTFS updating access times by default. So ...

RexRollman · on Dec 19, 2011

The updating of last access time has been disabled since the release of Windows Vista (although you can turn it back on):

http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2006/11/07/disabl...

lloeki · on Dec 19, 2011

Mac OS X does appear to mount with atime but I happened to use this:

    $ cat /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.nullvision.noatime.plist    
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" 
            "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
    <plist version="1.0">
        <dict>
            <key>Label</key>
            <string>com.nullvision.noatime</string>
            <key>ProgramArguments</key>
            <array>
                <string>mount</string>
                <string>-vuwo</string>
                <string>noatime</string>
                <string>/</string>
            </array>
            <key>RunAtLoad</key>
            <true/>
        </dict>
    </plist>

I don't know if there's anything like relatime.

darklajid · on Dec 19, 2011

As posted elsewhere and as someone pointed out in the very comments of the article: That doesn't seem to be the case for Windows 7 anymore.

shintoist · on Dec 19, 2011

But most Linux distros do this by default as well. You have to mount with noatime to get rid of it.

wazoox · on Dec 19, 2011

In fact nowadays most (all?) linux filesystems use relatime as default, which carries most of the advantages of both atime and noatime. See http://kerneltrap.org/node/14148

I don't know if something similar exists under windows (I suppose it doesn't).

kinetik · on Dec 19, 2011

Linux has defaulted to relatime since 2009.