Can I Keep My External HD from Spinning Down?

I've got an external HD connected to my Mac Pro running Snow Leopard. But I'm always getting spinning beach balls as I wait for the external drive to spin up and become available.
Is there any way for me to keep that drive always spinning?
The Energy Saver setting "Put the hard Disk(s) to sleep when possible" is already unchecked.
Thanks for any help.
-=-Joe

Here is a discussion on the subject from a dubious source...
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=493300
In a Discussion on CHUD tools...
I have a NewerTech miniStack connected to my eMac, and I follow one of the oldest mantras in computing: "Save early. Save often." That means saving every few minutes, but sometimes OS X puts your external drive to sleep sooner than you'd like, and that means that you have to wait for the drive to spin up to speed before your file can be saved.
From a source I never use but I believe you have linked here once or twice:
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/sbbod.html
"To conserve energy, modern hard disk drives are designed to spin-down after a certain period of inactivity. This is usually referred to as "hard drive sleep" but the technical term is Standby mode.
In Standby mode, the hard drive is in a state of low energy consumption and its platters have ceased to spin. It is awaiting a read or write instruction, at which time the hard drive will spin-up its platters — wake up and enter Active mode — to perform the read or write operation. It can require up to 30-35 seconds for a hard drive to spin up once in Standby mode."
Also here...
http://www.szilveszter.ca/news/prevent-hard-disk-drive-spindown-on-mac-os-x/
I believe I could do a fuller search but I did do due diligence for 'ya
-mj

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I don't think this works on external drives, but you may want to check to see if your Mac's Disk Sleep Timer setting may have been changed. Disk Sleep Timer is one of your Mac's Power Management settings and can be found under the Power item in System Profiler. The default setting for Leopard is 180 minutes, but for Tiger it was only 10 minutes, which was quite annoying.
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Message was edited by: GabrielZ

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