I have never worried about disks not spinning down when they were unmounted, and nothing bad has
ever happened to my external drives in the time I have been using linux. I am always careful to unmount them (one way or another) before I remove them though.
In 10.04 I notice that my external HDD now spins down when it is "Safely removed" from the gnome GUI.
Neat, and I see this as an improvement, but before, I just used to wait a few seconds, and then pull the USB plug. Then it would spin down. This drive is about four years old, and as I said, I have never had a problem with it (it is ext3 formatted, and passed
fsck with a clean bill of health about two weeks ago).
So, as I said, if you are worried, please do some experiments: Put some non-essential data on the drive, then try suspend or whatever (I'd suggest you do try this more than once), and see what happens. Run
fsck on it (when it is unmounted, of course), even if errors have not been reported. Then you'll have your answer, and please post it here.
I confess that I do not use suspend, sleep, hibernate etc: My devices are either "on", and being used for something, or "off". I have an odd dislike of these "in-between" states. Perhaps I'm a binary geek at heart