There is one common denominator. The I/O magic case.
That is where there is more than likely firmware that is
making these drives suspend. The newer drives also have
spin down set on the hard drives. Which is what some of the
posts were trying to get at.
This may get you somewhere:
http://sobell.com/mgsblog/archives/5
DISCLAIMER:
I skimmed the information and I have used these commands before.
However that does not reduce the risk of loosing data. Only use
on a drive where the data can be lost.
HTH
Bigpaws
The drives themselves(WD green and Hitachi green) have a spindown feature and will spindown to save power when not accessed after a set time all by themselves on any interface, SATA in a machine or on the USB SATA enclosure, they will then restart when they are accessed again.
Thanks for the link as far as I can tell(So far I don't know much about Linux, in the future I hope to change that, but at the moment I need help to get things working.), I think that link you gave me has the info needed to get this working as long as someone can tell me the exact way to enter this,
"With an argument of 0 (zero), the –S option prevents the drive from entering low-power mode and spinning down. The numeric arguments cause the drive to spin down after a specified period of inactivity. An argument in the range of 1-240 causes the drive to spin down after nx5 seconds (120 causes the drive to spin down after 10 minutes of inactivity). An argument in the range 241-251 cause the drive to spin down after (n-240)x30 minutes. These values may vary between drive manufacturers." ,
As you see it doesn't explain how to setup the command for the terminal(Almost all the commands had examples but this one.

), as far as I can tell it would be something like "sudo hdparm -s /dev/sdf ? ? ?" ware the ? ? ? bit is the numeric argument? but I could not find an example of how to do it.
I searched and found this link which has all the hdparm entries
http://www.clearfoundation.com/docs/man/index.php?s=8&n=hdparmbut it has no example of how to enter the -S command either.
(On a personal note, I wonder why the programmer created parameters for hdparm in both upper and lower case letters that do different things? This seems real scary to me, in that simply putting in the wrong case could screw up your hard drives data.)
If someone could help me out and show me the exact commands to use to shut off the spindown all together I would be most great full.
Also how would I make this permanent so the drive is always set so it doesn't spindown.
I only have the USB drive on when I'm reading or writing to it anyway, as I figure the less a hard drive runs the longer it will last.
Anyway thanks for the help.