Been playing with archlinux recently, its everything that gentoo should have been. I downloaded the USB image then proceeded to install it on to my eeepc 701. I then found this http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Asus_Eee_PC_701, which I so rightly read and took some hints from it.

I did all the usual things of turn off the swap disk, mounting /tmp and /var/log into a tmpfs and I made sure that noatime was enabled for the filesystems that I do have on the SSD.

Another thing I did was put nilfs2 on my SD card and mounted /home on it. So most of my writes are now either in memory or on my SD card which I can replace relatively cheaply and easily.