I would mount the drive with
noatime
but your drive might be broken, even if the output of
sudo smartctl -A /dev/sdX
or
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdX
seems to be ok.
I agree with David regarding the advantage of a SSD. I own two
_inexpensive_ TOSHIBA-TL100 (OCZ TL100) 240 GB. Free as in beer Linux
software for OCZ SSDs is provided by the Arch User Repository, it's
useful, since the output of smartctl for those SSDs is cryptic.
I disagree on the statement that increasing the frames has got no
negative impact. It could affect MIDI jitter, when recording MIDI tracks
with external MIDI equipment to audio tracks.
--
$ pacman -Q linux{,-rt{,-cornflower,-pussytoes}}|awk '{print $2}'
4.14-2
4.13.13_rt5-1
4.11.12_rt16-1
4.14_rt1-1