A quick google of SSD Linux shows alot of different ideas and I thought I would record the ones I used.
BTW a quick benchmark of my previous SATA 1 Toshiba 60GB 5400 2.5 drive with hdparm -t showed about 30MB/S.
Here's the steps I used.
1. Disk alignment
I used this guide http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?77769-A-Simple-How-To-on-Partitioning-and-Alignment-on-GNU-Linux-using-fdisk which basically says, make sure each partition starts on a sector that is divisible by 512.
I quickly knocked up a OpenSUSE live usb stick (dd_rescue openSUSE-11.4-KDE-LiveCD-x86_64.iso /dev/sdX)
I then fired up fdisk with sudo fdisk -H 32 -S 32 /dev/sda and created a 3 partition layout. fdisk offered to start the partition on a sector divisible by 512 so very little work was needed here.
NB On a fresh install of OpenSUSE 11.4 and no optimisations hdparm -t was giving 117.45 MB/sec - already almost 4 times quicker!
2. Change Disk Scheduler
Given that disks have been on various patters before SSD's, operating systems have therefore been optimised for them by default. http://www.gnutoolbox.com/linux-io-elevator/ This describe them all. You can see which one your are currently using by doing
cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
based on http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/09/04/four-tweaks-for-using-linux-with-solid-state-drives/ I am going to use deadline scheduler and set the /sys/block/sda/queue/iosched/fifo_batch to 1
So in /etc/rc.d/boot.local I added:-
echo deadline > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/queue/iosched/fifo_batch
3. Enable TRIM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM)
This is easily enabled in any >= 2.6.33 kenel via fstab. Here's my entry for //dev/disk/by-id/ata-OCZ-VERTEX2_OCZ-F1B8655OI4BKW33W-part2 / ext4 noatime,acl,user_xattr,discard 1 1
4. Disable noatime (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stat_(Unix))
Add the noatime option to fstab (see above example)
