sorry but you fail to relize what my post ment.
depending on what time e.g year you bought you HDD and what region for what matter have slight hardware changes and improvements depening on the manifacturers wishs "We have the right to change any aspect of the hardware without giving prior notice"
for your post to be valid you would of had to have bought the same HDD from the same place in the same quarter it was made
basically the same HDD that was bought 1 year ago is most definetly NOT going to have the exact specs as one bought a week ago.
to test a spindown theory simply load a game up hit the home button and leave it standing for 15-30 mins depending on the configuration of the HDD it'll be different across different manufacturers, then when the times up hit the home button again and if the game freezes, its a spindown issues
and yes WD My Books Essential 1TB HDD's do have spindowns, EVERY HDD ever made internal or external has spindowns it depends on OS configurations and hardware configurations that determin when a HDD actual spins down, the whole point of a HDD spindown is to save energy(not that its much) and to extend the life of the HDD, thus spining down the HDD when its not in use
p.s in all your videos ive noticed that the HDD your using takes it time on spinups, hence CFG counts up because your drive has fallen asleep and CFG is waiting for it to spin up