WD Intelli-park - delay before writing ?

[Defenestration]

I need a new storage HD and am a fan of WD, so was thinking of getting a Greenpower drive. However, the intelli-park feature has got me thinking if it's the drive for me. Suppose the WD GP drive soft parks the head due to nothing having been written/read to/from the drive for eight seconds. If I then save/copy a file to the drive, how long does it take to start up again ?

As I may get the 1.5TB drive, I've read that this drive is not compatible with the tool that can be used to either disable this intelli-park feature, or increase the eight second duration. Has anyone with a WD15EADS successfully disabled intelli-park or modified the intelli-park duration ?


As I'm paranoid about data loss, I may get two 1.5TB drives and will either get two WD15EADS, two Samsung F2 EcoGreen's, or one of each. I won't run them in RAID1, but any important data that gets backed up to one, will then be copied onto the other drive (as secondary backup). The drives will also probably be used for some media files, and some general temp workspace when needed.

 

[mosfet]

Bear in mind that read arms are capable of covering the distance from one edge of the platter to the other several dozen times per second, and sudden-motion sensors in laptops cause heads to park in milliseconds; I doubt the soft-parking feature of these will be noticeable at all.