Files on XP: Is turning off "last access time" safe?

Question

I'm desperately looking for cheap ways to lower the build times on my home PC. I just read an article about disabling the Last Access Time attribute of a file on Windows XP, so that simple reads don't write anything back to disk.

It's really simple too. At a DOS-prompt write:

fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1

Has anyone ever tried it in the context of building C++ projects? Any drawbacks?

[Edit] More on the topic here.

Answer 1

From SetFileTime's documentation:

"NTFS delays updates to the last access time for a file by up to one hour after the last access."

There's no real point turning this off - the original article is wrong, the data is not written out on every access.

EDIT:

As to why the author of that article claimed a 10x speed-up, I think he attributed his speed-up to the wrong thing: he also disabled 8.3 filename generation. To generate an 8.3 filename for a file, NTFS has to basically generate each possibility in turn then see if it's already in use (no reference; I'm sure Raymond has talked about it but can't find a link). If your files all share the same first six characters, you will be bitten by this problem, and the corrolary is you should put characters which differentiate files in the first six characters so they don't clash. Turning off short name generation will prevent this.