relatime
also: relative atime
A mount option that reduces disk writes by updating file access times only when they are older than the modification or change time, or when the file is actually accessed.
relatime is a filesystem mount option that optimizes performance by limiting how often the access time (atime) metadata is written to disk. Instead of updating atime on every file read, it only updates when atime is older than the modification time (mtime) or change time (ctime), or when the file hasn't been accessed in over 24 hours.
This differs from atime (which updates on every access, causing many disk writes) and noatime (which never updates access times). For example, reading a log file repeatedly with relatime won't trigger disk writes unless the file is modified or enough time passes.
You can mount a filesystem with relatime using: mount -o relatime /dev/sda1 /mnt. Most modern Linux distributions use relatime by default because it balances the need for access-time tracking with reasonable performance.