From day one my WD1200BEVE (P-ATA) unparked its heads after ~8 seconds of idle time. The clicking sound and subsequent delay when accessing the drive were the only annoyances I had with it.
Up until now I always assumed it was the same unloading mechanism that controlled the Green Caviar drives even though it is a Scorpio Blue. It seems wasn’t the case after all because after ONCE setting different values for APM with HDDScan(.com), the clicking and all head unparking is gone - for good. This is a small dilemma because I don’t know if my action caused a problem or solved one.
Is there a wrong way of adjusting the APM values? The other drives I configured the same way actually accept the numbers, not so the Scorpio Blue drive which resets the APM to 128 after every power down. No matter what the value is set to, I cannot observe any difference other than a status change in the identity report of the drive.