It would seem that they don't even spin the disk down then, if its at 17 watts. I wonder if it decreases further after some time (like several hours).
Anyway, its too much for something that is doing nothing IMO. Does Wake on Lan work over WiFi, is a 5 second delay while it spins up the disk too long? Perhaps a bunch of "fixes" will come out of the community...its a pretty interesting device to hack.