Modern SSDs are so fast, that throughput will also be limited by the host CPU.

Interesting, that may actually be why JFS is so fast, it has very low CPU usage. I didn't know this was why.

This seems way off. I have nothing to back it up other than just knowing RAM and SATA III speeds (maybe there's something else occuring that I'm not aware of... is it CPU intensive to write to an SSD? That doesn't seem right...), but the interface between RAM and the CPU is much faster than the interface between the CPU and the SSDs. I think you're still limited by the flash hardware itself, and then the interface (SATA III). DDR3-1333 has a max bandwidth of 10.6 GBps, and DDR3-1866 maxes out at 14.9 GBps (source). SATA III has a max theoretical limit of 6.0 Gbps, but real world limits of 600MBps. I'd be surprised if you move the needle much on your CPU usage when transferring files from one SSD to another (I can't test since I only have one SSD).

I recently replaced my Thinkpad's 5400RPM HDD with Kingston SSD(UV100 120GB). I simply used ext4 for / and /home with noatime plus discard options. I even have swap on SSD, I don't care if it's good or not to have it on SSD.

The system is now fluid like smoke from Bob's Cigar. Much smoothness, much like.

Regards.

First of all, a big thank you to all who contributed to this thread. I am not a programmer - just a reasonably experienced Slacker - but I've learned a lot from just following this through!

My new machine is now up and running - I'm typing this on it! I went for Ext4 (because I've been using it a while without issues) and put both / and swap on the SSD. I figured with 16GB of ram, the swap shouldn't get used much anyway! I also added noatime and discard to the / fstab entry and switched to the deadline scheduler. All I can say is wow! This machine is like greased lightning compared to the one it replaced!

I've taken the bull by the horns and installed slack64-current (should make upgrading to the next stable release easier!) and UEFI. The UEFI install didn't go completely to plan due to my inexperience with it, but I know Slack well enough to work out what I'd done wrong and fix it. I'm actually quite pleased with myself for that!

The motherboard is a Gigabyte Z97X, though in contrast with my earlier machines, I've stuck with the on-board Intel graphics. I don't need 3D performance - most of my work is video - and the Intel graphics with vaapi are even faster than my previous NVidia / vdpau setup.

All in all, I'm a very happy bunny, in no small part thanks to the excellent advice given here.

Again, many thanks to all concerned!

--
Pete