LinuxQuestions.org - udev/udevadm trigger led to disks being unable to spin down for more than a second

(Semi-crosspost from the Gentoo forums, I rewrote this text, though.)

Here's everything I did:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p...4.html#6117744 (TL;DR: added two udev rules matching my MAC addresses and renaming eth* to net/lan, and ran "udevadm trigger net".)
Nothing whatsoever was related to the disk subsystem, except for, most likely, "udevadm trigger net" which appears to scan through a vast amount of device nodes, including all disks and partitions, according to "udevadm trigger --dry-run --verbose net".

The system has an uptime of 214 days, and the problem started within 5 minutes (that's how often I log the disk status) of me running udevadm, so hardly a coincidence.

They are three SATA disks, by the way.
The three disks are in a md RAID5 array, but the array is stopped and as such not mounted, and iostat shows *no* disk activity when they are spun up.
As soon as I try to spin them down (hdparm -y /dev/sdX), they start spinning again within 0.5-4 seconds at most... with the exception that I somehow, for a totally unknown reason, managed to get sdc to be in standby for a few hours now. I have no clue why it's that particular disk out of the three; they are different models, but equally sized, same partitions (100% to the RAID array), etc.

Code:

(13:36) exscape ~ # hdparm -y /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:

 issuing standby command

(13:36) exscape ~ # hdparm -C /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:

 drive state is:  active/idle ### should be "standby"



-- In another window, started before any hdparm commands were sent --

(13:36) exscape ~ # udevadm monitor

monitor will print the received events for:

UDEV - the event which udev sends out after rule processing

KERNEL - the kernel uevent



KERNEL[1262522217.633318] change  /block/sdb (block) <-- when shutting it down

UDEV  [1262522219.023900] change  /block/sdb (block)  <-- when shutting it down - or is this the startup? 1.4 seconds after the kernel event.

KERNEL[1262522226.228927] change  /block/sdb (block) <-- when using hdparm -C to check status 7 seconds later

UDEV  [1262522226.335246] change  /block/sdb (block)  <-- when using hdparm -C to check status 7 seconds later

The only way I've found to power them down, without the instant powerup, is "udevadm control --stop-exec-queue", which as far as I understand is basically pausing udev until you resume it... doesn't sound appealing, so I restarted it soon thereafter, which spun them right up again. :(
(Actually, I tried that again; sdb and sdd spun up, sdc is still in standby.
sdb is a WD Green 1TB (WD10EADS)
sdc is a Hitachi 7K1000(.B?) 1TB
sdd is a Hitachi 7K1000(.B?) 1TB

Anyone have a solution in mind - except for rebooting and hoping for the best?