@ Noobsauce,
We will have to agree to disagree. I know the Samsung 2TB drives I had been running has a mode for parking the heads while leaving the drive running, it's very obvious when you hear the heads loading. This is not Intelli-park and as far as I know the drive must be put into this lower power mode. And as for the wear leveling, I've read about that in the past quite a bit and I've never heard of it on a non-A/V drive but I won't state it doesn't exist on a non-A/V drive, and everything I've read. Here is an example:
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/AAG/ENG/2178-771127.pdf
Which states: Preemptive Wear Leveling (PWL)
The drive arm frequently sweeps across
the disk to reduce uneven wear on the
drive surface common to audio video
streaming applications.
I've never heard of the arm being moved for thermal stabilization benefits and I don't recall the heads on my computer drive just sweeping across the platters without some sort of cause. And the heads do crash periodically, it happens and with these mechanical drives there is no way around it. On some drives, like the newer laptop drives, a sudden impact forces them to park the heads immediately. The heads pop back out quickly after that event but it's an attempt to reduce the damage inflicted by the user.
I do know back in the 1999-2002 I had some drives(I forget which brand exactly) would park the heads after a certain amount of idle time in an attempt to increase reliability. The theory was that if you park the head for much of the drive's life it might extend their lifespan by protecting the data from potential damage from the head. I haven't had any drives do that since around that time, and I had been told years ago it was because it was determined there was observed benefit.
Interesting that they'd even make a comment like that(about PWL). I'd really like to know how a single sweep of a mechanical arm will "even" out the wear and tear. In AV you usually have a constant even reading or writing, and based your setup you could easily use some sectors more than others. Honestly, it sound ALOT like marketing BS. I'll have to send an email to my contact and see what the hooplah is about.
To be honest, I'm not sure believe that the Intelli-park technology increases reliability either. But I have no data to back up that claim, just my opinion.
As for the temperature compensation, the data physically moves as the platters and mechanical arm expand. The temperature is taken and a few disk reads are performed to determine how much compensation is required. I think that the industry standard was something like 1 compensation every 5 minutes for the first hour. When the timer determines that the compensation is required it is not normally performed until the next read or write is performed, but some drives will do it after the timer is up regardless(it's mostly based on manufacturer). For the drives that wait, the compensation takes 20-30ms, so you would likely never be able to notice that the compensation is being performed.