non-pch linux drive tuning

[accident]

I figured I'd ask on this forum in case some people have some recommendations..

I have a low end amd-e 350 machine I use for dev and always on low electricity usage things.. It just happened that I hit a decent ram sale so I was able to load it up with memory. but I did reuse some old parts and it's ain a tiny ass case with a 2.5" laptop drive.. It's on a ups, correctly monitoring it for shutdown so I have room to tune the drive using more in ram options..

But I'm not some die hard linux person, while comfortable I'm not even really sure what to start looking at and how to figure out what stuff i'm seeing on google is safe or risky to do..

The install:
- ubuntu 11 server headless, installed with LAMP settings
- opencl added, probably not doing anything but there is a gpu on the board although it's an amd not nvidia chip.
- swapiness set to 0
- appears default format is ext4 on the drive..

So can anyone point me at some safe drive tuning ext4 with ubuntu sites that I could use to get a little more performance without having to start looking at higher performance drives.. I can see/feel the slowdown when things are drive intensive so I'm thinking this will be a nice change espeically with about about 6 gigs of memory free.

[Iced]

Hey accident, I found this thread useful as a general start for overall system performance and a number of filesystem related tweaks. Have you considered Ubuntu version 12.04 LTS? I've been running Ubuntu since 2006 and currently on 10.04 LTS about to migrate to 12.04 LTS.