Hard drive standby is driving me crazy

I have a 4 drive external USB hard drive enclosure for storage and, since I'm rarely using them, they are usually in stand by mode. This is good, because I don't there's no sense in keeping them fully powered, and I don't even mind waiting for them to wake up when I need them. With 4 drives, it usually takes about 45 seconds, and in the meantime I'm staring at the beach ball.

The problem is the drives spin back up every time I try to save a file in Firefox. And as far as I'm concerned, they absolutely should not. My default save location isn't on any of these drives. Is there any way I can prevent this without turning off standby for the hard drives?

Weird. This actually may be a bug in Firefox. I would recommend issuing a bug report on Bugzilla.

I doubt it's a bug in Firefox, but it couldn't hurt submitting it anyway. This is a long-standing "issue" with Mac OS X. Many times it's due to one or all of those drives being aliased in the Favorites - which shows up in the sidebar of Finder windows and the Open/Save dialogs. Simply by hitting Save, it activates the sidebar and begins searching for the drives.

If you rarely use them disconnect and problem solved.

harry, it's not that rare.. They're full of my movies and music for iTunes and AppleTV. Sometimes I turn the enclosure off but I'd honestly rather deal with the wait than leave them off.

CreativeGuy, I thought that might be the issue, is there a way to remove them from the favorites list?