Waking Mac from sleep, starts unmounted hard drive.

Hi there if I unmount/eject my external harddrive it powers down.  However if I my iMac goes to sleep and I wake it back up it also powers on the external harddrive which starts spinning, despite the fact it's not mounted.  I can get it to stop by going into disk utility and ejecting it again (even though it is already ejected and not showing in finder).  But this is annoying to do everytime I want to wake my computer up.
How can stop my iMac from powering on the external harddrive everytime it wakes up?

I recently started to have this problem as well.  i just started using a new imac,  ( most current version 21.5 inch. 
i never had this happen with my older 17 inch imac,  even through different versions of os x including lion.
is there a way to stop my external drive from mounting and running each time i wake my mac?

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