Failure with boosting HDD performance

Today I've read an article at tuxradar.com with some Linux tips. In this article it is recommended to boots the performance of HDD. It is suggested to set options for root to defaults,relatime,data=writeback in /etc/fstab
So I did. Then rebooted and.. guess what? My Mandriva One 2009 failed to boot. Luckily this was not my first boot failure (and I guess not the last :D ). So, I had a SystemRescueCd an some live CDs at hand.
First of all I've checked man for mount to get some info about relatime and data=writeback options. There is nothing special with former, but the latter is not so easy to use. Changing default value requires passing additional kernel boot parameter. E.g. rootflags=data=journal. So modified the kernel row in my GRUB configuration file. But Mandriva still failed to boot. Then on some mailing list I've found that rootflags should go directly after root option. This did not helped either.
So, I changed all settings to original state. No faster HDD operations for me. At least for now...

P.S. Just curious whether guys at tuxradar.com actually try to apply theirs tricks themselves before urging others to do so.