[the_mat]

Can you imagine the pain caused by transitioning away from HFS+? Is there something so fundamentally wrong with it to justify all the compatibility headaches of a new filesystem?

Under the hood, there's some low-hanging fruit that I'm surprised Apple hasn't gone for yet:

* Turn off the writing of ALL memory to disk every time a laptop is put to sleep. Got an SSD MacBook Pro with 16GB? Every time you close the lid, sixteen gigabytes get written. Every time.

* Disable file access times so every file that gets opened doesn't need to have the timestamp updated.

[LaGrange]

Leave both alone. Sorting by last access time is really useful. Saving the memory dump means there's space for recovery when batteries run out while asleep – it just takes a bit longer.

[andyzweb]

atime is on by default to ensure POSIX conformance. you can disable it by setting noatime which I believe is supported by HFS+ in both it's case and non-case sensitive variants