hello world. my mounted drives open slow with ubuntu 10.10 and 10.04. it does this with all boxes i have installed 10.10 or 10.04. it doesn't do this with 9.10 or before. it doesn't matter if it's USB drives or partitions on the same drive as the OS or flash drives. if time has gone by when i last opened the mounted drive/partition it won't open. it's like they go to sleep and then have to be woke up again. the checkbox in the screensaver settings that says "spin down hard disks when possible" is not checked off. sometimes i have to click the mounted drive icon 2 or 3 times to get it to do anything and open the mounted drive. it doesn't matter what the file system type is either. i checked the mouse click settings and played around with them. power management settings are set to "never" spin down. i am using standard ubuntu desktop on all scenarios. it gets annoying.

thanks, MIKE...

Are the drives Seagate Free Agent? There has been a problem with them on Linux known for a long time. The following link is one of many on this subject.
http://alienghic.livejournal.com/382903.html

it doesn't matter what brand HD. i have an old maxtor experiment drive, a WD raptor and seagate experiment drive. all the firmware has been updated on them. i went to your link and read up on the condition you stated. very interesting. i'm wondering if it is a nautilus/gnome issue. i usually change my "appearance preferences" to "clearlooks" after i install. maybe that causes it? next install i will leave everything total default and see what that does. thanks for your insight.

MIKE...