nautilus occasionally hangs, waking up external hdd
 

I am running Ubuntu 8.04 and have a 500gig Maxtor external USB HDD. It works perfectly, and after not being accessed for 10 or 15 minutes it goes into a "sleep" kind of mode, where the drive slows (or maybe stops) spinning, and the light fades. When accessing it again there is a delay of a couple of seconds while it wakes up.

The problem is that sometimes when I open Places->Home Folder, or some other location, the disk will be woken up, causing the delay before nautilus opens.

I have tried adding the drive (/media/disk) to "Ignored Paths" under System->Preferences->Search and Indexing, but it didn't stop this.

What could be causing this, and how can I stop it?

Thanks.

Bump. I was just about to post a similar message on the Ubuntu forums, but decided to search, and here I am.

I have a 400GB WD external hard drive. The drive goes to sleep obnoxiously often (seems like five minutes or less), and quite frequently Nautilus will wake it up by simply clicking Back or Forward, or another directory, even when it's displaying a completely different drive/partition. I'd rather have a device storing my data go through so many sleep/wake cycles--it can't be good for it. Not to mention, it's 3-5 seconds longer for Nautilus to be responsive than it would be otherwise when it wakes the drive up for whatever reason and has to wait for it to be available.

Even worse, if I leave a Nautilus window open (and I always do) with something like my home directory, browse the Web for maybe 6 minutes, and then click the nautilus window to bring it back into focus, it STILL wakes the drive up. Again, it's usually the home directory that I'm in, but even then--why should it wake up the drive even if it's a directory stored on the external drive, just to show what's already displayed in the window? It's extremely annoying, and I have no idea what to do to fix this behavior.

Wow, there it goes again, fell asleep before I could even post this message. I bet within 2 minutes it'll be waking up again for no reason whatsoever.