Spinning ball while the hard drives warm up

Hi guys,
I have a G-Tech 1TB (Firewire 800) hard drive, a 500GB (Firewire 400) drive and two internal sata drives (not striped together) I also have a wireless keyboard and mouse.
If I leave the computer alone for a few minutes, each time I return to FCP, I have to wait for the spinning ball to stop. It sounds like the hard drives are warming up again, but its really annoying having to wait so often. I am working in a long project of 90 minutes length, but this also happens in shorther projects as well.
I have unchecked the 'put the hard drives to sleep as often as possible' and set the energy saver to 1 hour but no difference.
Any ideas?
Thanks as always.
Stephen - UK

you can minimize occurrences of the SBBOD due to hard drive sleep by making BOTH of the following selections in the Sleep tab of Energy Saver preferences:
1. select "Never" for System sleep, and
2. de-select "Put the hard drive to sleep when possible".
in Tiger, this is GUI equivalent of sending the "pmset" command in the terminal with the argument disksleep 0
or you could just jump straight into the terminal app (/Applications/Utilities/) and use the command
sudo pmset -a spindown 0

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