I wasn't offering an opinion as to whether this feature is desirable or otherwise, I was merely confirming that this head parking behaviour is by design, ie it is not a defect. WD's drives behave this way as well. FWIW, I prefer to have full control over my drive's power management settings, but I believe that there are certain situations where APM would be desirable, for example if the drive were in an external enclosure attached to a TV. That said, there are USB enclosures where the bridge IC inside the enclosure spins the drive up or down as required rather than the drive itself. Moreover, some bridge firmware actually issues an ATA APM command to the drive immediately after power on. You could easily configure your desktop or laptop to do exactly the same thing.
To this end, I would bite the bullet and use hdparm to disable APM, or reduce its aggressiveness. AIUI, your drive's APM settings are volatile, ie they don't survive a power cycle, so you will need to do this after every cold boot. You could place an appropriate hdparm command line in a CMD or BAT file in your StartUp group. This will result in hdparm being executed automatically at bootup, after which it will terminate and exit. In this way there will be absolutely no impact on your system's resources.
In fact, if I were in your shoes, I would be just as concerned, perhaps more so, about the mysterious task that is accessing your drive each minute, apparently without your knowledge. I'm not a Windows 7 user, but I would look in Task Manager and terminate likely suspects until this annoying behaviour stops.
