In fstab, which option disables the update of file access times?

• A. noatime
• B. nodiratime
• C. relatime
• D. sync

Answer: (A)

Access time updates happen whenever a file is read, which can cause extra disk writes. The noatime option tells the system not to update the access time on reads, effectively turning off updates to file access times for the mounted filesystem. This improves performance by removing those extra writes.

Other options behave differently: nodiratime disables atime updates only for directory inodes, so file atimes still update. relatime is a compromise that updates atime less aggressively (not on every read) but does not fully disable atime updates. sync relates to when data is flushed to disk and does not control atime behavior.