Hard drive cycling on and off

Often when my Mac Pro is awake but I am not using it, the hard drives seem to cycle every few minutes between sleep and being awake. The noise is irritating. I have unchecked the "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" checkbox in the Energy Saver Preference Pane, and the computer is set for sleep only after 3 hours of inactivity. Has anyone else noticed this? Any suggestions for how to avoid it?
Mac Pro   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

Given your disksleep value your drives shouldn't sleep for 3 hours. What you can do is try setting the drive sleep time to zero which should stop it sleeping altogether. To do this type…
sudo pmset -a disksleep 0
… in Terminal, insert your password when asked and then restart. You'll get one or more warnings when you do this although just ignore them.
See how that goes.

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