What's The Optimal Time In Seconds For Hard Drives To Park Their Heads?

I have a WD20EARS drive that parks it's head every 8 seconds when idle [to save on energy and other reasons]... Western Digital released a firmware fix that only changes the idle head parking time. Mainly because most people out there are saying that the 8 second idle park time can wear the drive down shortening it's life span. I can choose any time limit in "seconds" only... Or "disable" head parking altogether indefinitely with the firmware fix.

I'm not as computer savvy as most but I would definitely like to know most of you think would be the best setting [how many seconds or disable] and why?

I will only be using the WD20EARS hdd in a usb enclosure under WinXP as data backup but it'll be on almost all of the time. Don't know if this is of any use but I have always set Hibernation, and Power Saving modes disabled in XP, so my monitor, drives, etc never turn off.


Thanks

:wave

 

Still I want to change it, and need to know the best park time.

Here's some more info so you can see that it does cause damage:

[Green Caviar: High Load Cycle Cout after short operation time]

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop...le-Cout-after-short-operation-time/td-p/15731