Excessive Hard Drive Spinup/-down

Hi!
I have my Mac Pro equipped with four hard drives:
Drive 1: 1 partition Mac OS X 10.6.2, 1 partition Boot Camp
Drive 2: 1 partition user home folders, 1 partition games
Drive 3: Downloads / Storage
Drive 4: Backups
Sometimes I leave the machine running over night doing downloads etc. When I wake up in the morning, I can hear at least two drives spinning down, then spinning up again only a few seconds later, spinning down again within a few minutes and so on. I fear they are doing that all night long.
Unfortunately, I can't really track which drives are affected, because when I check sleep status with SpindownHD from the developer tools, this interferes with the process and they don't spin down anymore. Sometimes I can see them spinning up, and it seems to be drives 3 and 4, though I can't be exactly sure that those are not just waking up from "regular" sleep.
My first thought was that OS X has some issues with the user home folders not being located on the system drive, but it seems that the user partition is unaffected.
Another special thing about my configuration is that the Downloads folder in my user folder is an Alias to the Storage drive (drive 3). That folder is used in Vuze (which usually is the software running over night) as the destination for finished downloads (not temporary files). Most of the time there are no downloads being finished, so it's not copying the finished downloads to the Storage drive that makes it spin up. But perhaps it's Vuze having a lock on the drive that prevents it from seleeping properly?
Setting different sleep times in SpindownHD or disabling hard drive sleep in SpindownHD or System Preferences (which actually sets it to 3hrs, as I have read) doesn't have any effect, nor has resetting PRAM.
Any hints would be appreciated!
Thanks!
Timo
Message was edited by: TaipanX
Message was edited by: TaipanX

i'll add a "me too" to the discussion. I have two firewire external drives connected to the mac mini. I used target disk mode to put all my user accounts from one of the backups onto the mini, but otherwise the mini is functioning fine as the boot drive, and it is a stock configuration. The external disks do not have to be connected so as fas I can tell there is no reason for them to spin up until I access them or until my backup program does. On my previous machine (iMac G5) I was running 10.4.11 with no hard disk spin up or down issues. Now I hear clicks for the spin up and down every day, throughout the day.
My request is for an Apple expert to please reply and either answer this thread or point us to one that gives more insight. Premature hard drive failure is my concern.
thanks.

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Scott Newman wrote:
After a few minutes, an external drive that is mounted on the desktop will spin down--like it should. But...each time a "Save" or "Save As..." dialog box is opened in any application, things will grind to halt for a few seconds while the external drive spins up--even though I will not be saving files to that drive. I've always hated that, which is one reason I've always done manual backups.
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Excessive Hard Drive Spinup/-down

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