as anyone bothered

to check if the drive also performs a spindown ?

head load/unload and spindown ae separate events...

the firmware in a harddisk does not unload the heads by itself. this has nothing to do with drive firmware. This control command is issued from the PC. whether it be the BIOS or the OS.

I seriously doubt its the bios ... after all once the OS is loaded the bios is pretty much dormant. i doubt that ubuntu / linux / windows are still performing bios calls... it may be a setting in the configuration that is beeing read and used , and that is a whole different story. that is a matter of reading the settings , throwing out what is ridiculous and using them with half a brain... just because some dimwit ticked the option to spin down every 5 seconds doesn't mean the OS should do this. It could display a warning box : are you sure you want ot put it that low ? this causes wear and tear .... blabla

i guess the fanboi's are too busy debating whether to use Gnome or KDE and Emacs or VI (lunix : deliberately misspelled ) ... or to ram aero and mandatory 'allow-deny' and secret updates to the updater down the users throats (windoze) or force you to use At&T for fear of bricking your iAddiction ... (didn't wan't to leave those out.)

me ? i'm waiting for the paris-hilton os ... so i can upgrade my DOS3.2 box ...