External WD Drives Waking Up Every 7 Minutes For No Apparent Reason

I have two WD 500GB MyBook Premium drives daisy chained (Firewire) together on my iMac.
The first drive is my Time Machine drive and the second drive is my image and Parallels VM backup drive.
Recently (after last Apple update) my drives have been waking up every five to seven minutes, not doing anything then going back to sleep.
Also, the drives are being awakened almost every time I start a finder session or try and save or locate a file on my Macintosh HD.
Is there a way I can get these drives to stay a sleep until they are actually needed for a Time Machine session of a SuperDuper backup session and not wake up every time I start a Finder session?
This is my first MAC so please be gentle!

UPDATE:
After running the "file watcher" event agent/service in TEST mode, I noticed that multiple instances of the process were running.  This event agent is supposed to continuously check for changes to a particular file and execute a job if the file has changed.  I had the job deleting the file as a final step, meaning that the file did not exist for the event agent to find unless a new one was created and placed in the target directory.  Apparently, when the event agent does not find the file at all, it results in an error condition that triggers execution of an additional instance of the JAVA process.  in a short time, there are dozens of instances running and the memory is exhausted. 
I changed the job to leave the file in the directory after the job completes, and the event agent no longer times out or runs out of memory.  The only down side to this is that when IdM is bounced or the event agents are restarted for any reason, the agent WILL process the file again as if it's new.  In our case that shouldn't matter, but to others it might. Just be warned if you use this type of event agent.  In my opinion, SAP should code the JAVA in a way that more elegantly handles the "file does not exist" scenario without invoking another JAVA instance each time. 

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