Erm, that just strikes me as a bad idea. It's the same reason you don't use a "product number" or similar external identifier as a primary key: it's subject to change outside the database that's just begging to get out of sync. What happens if you move to a different machine (or even just a different filesystem on the same box)? What happens if the drive crashes and things get reloaded from a backup? You've just set yourself up to write more code to deal with these contingencies (which means more development time, more testing (and are you really sure you've covered all the cases?)).

Just seems like you're being overly clever to "save" yourself or your DB from doing a trivial bit of work. If you want something tied to the file itself an MD5 or the like would be a better choice than the inum.

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