Concern about disabling LCC timer

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

I have been reading this forum over the past few days and I have not seen anyone mention premature platter wear or wear leveling with respect to disabling the head parking timer.  I do see most people are electing to set a timer value of 300 seconds vice 8 seconds which I personally agree with.  If you disable the timer then the heads sits on the platter all the time inducing wear, a fact you cannot get around.

So I have a wear level question:

If the heads never park, do they normally sit at one location when not in use or do they move around the platter to ensure wear leveling of the platter?

I ask this because it looks like WD made a change to the Red series where the drives use to have the timers disabled but now they are set to 8 seconds.  I’m sure there was a reason for it, I’m just curious if I should change my WD Red 2TB drives from a disabled timer (factory value) to a 300 second value which makes great sense to me for my home system which only serves as a backup device and streams video a few times a week.

2

Hello,

 The head will only move when it is required to access data from another location on the hard drive.

3

Hum, I would think it to head back to the outer edge but I can accept that.

I’m still curious if those of us who have the timer disabled, if we should enable it and set it for 300 seconds or just leave well enough alone.  As I mentioned above, I would rather not cause premature wear of my drives due to the friction of the flying head.  That friction being the air friction which does cause wear.