My Book Studio won't spin back up

I just bought a 1gb WDC My Book Studio drive. It has the same power-management features as another drive I have; after a few minutes of idle time, it spins down. When you access it again, it spins up.
The only problem is, it hangs Finder when it powers down. If I try to open the disk, it spins up fine (I can hear it), but Finder just sits there and beachballs. It never recovers. If I unplug the drive, Finder throws me an error about not putting ejecting the disk. If I then plug it back in, it does not show up; I must power the drive down and back up for it to be recognized again.
The drive is quad-interface, and the problem occurs when connected by USB or FireWire 800. I haven’t plugged it in to the FW400 port, and I don’t have an eSATA port.
Any thoughts? This worked fine with my previous drive, a 300gb Buffalo. Is this an issue with my laptop, or a problem with the drive?
I’m sort of leaning towards a problem with the drive.

I talked to a WD rep on the phone and he told me to download a program that would disable the spindown "feature". The only thing is it's only made for windows (found here http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?swid=17). I saw when I was first looking that someone had come up with the idea of using crontab to execute the command "touch" on a hidden file on the drive every five minutes (found here http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=298694). When I tried to do this I was met with resistance as I found out that since Tiger, Mac OS X no longer uses crontab, it uses LaunchD. So I gave a shot at editing a LaunchD file for this and had no luck...then someone turned me on to Lingon (free http://lingon.sourceforge.net/) which is supposed to make this east to do. I could not figure out for the live of me what I was doing wrong, but here I sit watching this drive spin up and down day in and day out...I know you can here me mybook...your probably plotting your revenge to die on me once I download 600 gigs worth of data...not on my watch you won't...NOT ON MY WATCH! MUHAHAHAHAha cough ahem...anyway...can someone figure this out so we don't have to endure this external drive torture?

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