[NBLUG/talk] HDD spins up on disk read and immediately spins back down - Debian Sid

[A.C.]

Greetings,

I'm mostly pinging the group about this one because of how strange it 
is.  I've got a Debian unstable system (installed from Kanotix 2005-02) 
and for some strange reason, the hard drive keeps spinning down as soon 
as any read or write attempts are complete.  In other words, when using 
the system, if I attempt to open or write to a file, I can hear the hard 
drive spin up, complete the read or write operation, and then 
immediately spin back down.  Doing an apt-get update is particularly 
fun/noisy.

I can't imagine this is by design, and I'm fairly certain it's only 
reducing the drive's longevity.  I've attempted to boot with noacpi set, 
but this didn't make much of a difference.  I don't see anything in 
KDE's power control tab that looks useful, and stopping laptop_mode 
didn't help either.  My system configuration is:

Asus A7N8X nForce 2 chipset motherboard
AMD Athalon XP 3000+ (2.2 GHz) proc
512 MB RAM
80 GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 ATA/133 hard drive

Does anyone have a suggestion about where to proceed next?  I see lots 
of stuff from wandering around Google about enabling spin-down modes for 
laptops, but nothing that quite addresses this problem.  Any assistance 
would be appreciated.  Thanks in advance,

A.C.
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