Tip 1: Use ext2 instead of ext3/ext4.
ext3 and ext4 are journaled filesystems and so maintain a log of all filesystem changes (which can be used for recovery if need be). If you're using a laptop chances are sudden power failure isn't really a threat so you'll lose less by not having a journaled filesystem - if you're using a desktop your choice to use a non-journaled filesystem should be an informed one.
Tip 2: Don't update file access times.
Modify your /etc/fstab adding noatime to the options for mounted drives. This will stop writing to the file system every time a file is accessed. (This is also used to improve disk I/O performance for critical applications - git does this for example, though they may have switched to relatime).
Tip 3: Mount "non-essential" write-heavy directories as tmpfs.
Update /etc/fstab to mount /tmp, /var/tmp and /var/log as tmps:
#
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults 0 0
Unfortunately when /var/log is now mounted it won't have any of the necessary directories so we'll need to create them each time on boot. Update /etc/rc.local with the following snippet just before the "exit 0" line.
for dir in apparmor apt ConsoleKit cups dist-upgrade fsck gdm installer libvirt news samba speech-dispatcher unattended-upgrades; do
if [ ! -e /var/log/$dir ] ; then
mkdir /var/log/$dir
fi
done
if [ ! -e /var/log/$dir ] ; then
mkdir /var/log/$dir
fi
done
You can get the list of directories you need by running cd /var/log; ls -d */
These tips can be found repeated on the web but I gathered most of my info from here. That page also lists some further optimisations for the kernel to take full advantage of an SSD's speed.
