A big item is making sure your filesystem partition is aligned properly. For example, by default the first partition begins on sector 63, which causes logical

A big item is making sure your filesystem partition is aligned properly. For example, by default the first partition begins on sector 63, which causes logical 4K blocks to straddle two different write blocks on the drive (causing both blocks to be read and re-written). Simple thing is to make sure the partition begins on sector 2048 (since it can begin on sector 0 due to the need to reserve the boot sectors).