access to hard drives is "blocked" by writes to a flash drive

[deeptech71]

On 03/19/2013 18:26, Marcus Reid wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 04, 2013 at 04:53:10AM +0100, deeptech71 wrote:
> I use atimes all the time to get to the bottom of lots of common
> problems.

Details !

It sounds like in your case, atime is a debugging feature (which are generally to be turned off on production systems).

> Turning off atime system-wide is a really bad move.

Your bikeshed.

Turning off atime works for me. SUPPORT_ATIME=0 would be an *optional* kernel option. Additionally a DEFAULT_NOATIME=1 may be provided.