[arch-general] Optimising ssd setup?

[Mike Cloaked]

As part of my planning for setting up a home build computer which will use
two ssd drives - one a Crucial M4 mSATA drive (for root and boot
partitions) and a second larger Crucial M4 SATA III drive for the rest, I
have been reading up about partitioning and optimising such drives -

It seems that it is important to partition with proper alignment to MiB
boundaries for partitions but I am unclear if this happens automatically or
not when setting up GPT partitions with gparted? ( I usually partition
using a liveusb running PartedMagic and then run gparted before installing
arch)

Also I have been seeing various bits of advice about ensuring that
excessive writes are avoided by using a non-default IO scheduler - with
"deadline" being the better option for SSDs than the default CFQ scheduler
- and it would seem that adding the parameter to the kernel line for boot
once a system is set up is perhaps a good way forward? How does that work
if UEFI booting?

In addition it is suggested that for a machine with a reasonable RAM (in my
case 8GiB) then reducing the "swappiness" parameter to 1 via systemctl, or
altering the relevant parameter under /proc/sys is the way to do it, even
if there is a swap partition on one of the SSDs.

I have also seen it suggested that TRIM support is important either
mounting with the "discard" option or running fstrim manually via a cron
job out of hours to avoid delays during writes whilst the system is in use.

Finally I have seen suggested that the "noatime" flag be used for mounting
SSD drives.

Can anyone on this list who has set up a recent SSD drive and has
experience of SSD wear issues, and levelling issues, offer any advice on
whether some or all of the above are important when using SSD drives in an
arch linux machine or whether partitioning and installing essentially with
defaults is going to lead to SSD problems, or not?

This will be my first foray into using SSD drives on any of my systems.

Thanks for any replies.

-- 
mike c