Why is my external drive always spinning up?

[decksnap]

It seems that doing the most random things on my computer will cause my external drive to spin up. It's usually plugged in a recognized, just idle. Then I'll go and open a file / program or something off of my internal drive and it will stall my system while it waits for the external drive to spin up. Anybody have any ideas?

Edit> Lacie FW drive external, OSX 10.4.3

 

[mfacey]

Mine used to act similarly. I found that by disabling the Spotlight searching and indexing on the external drive keeps it quiet until I actually open it in Finder. I only use it for backups so I don't need Spotlight functionality on it.

 

[decksnap]

Makes sense, yeah, but why does spotlight need to access my external drive every time I open something locally? I would like to keep spotlight functionality if possibly.