Comment 9 for bug 361680

This is happening with my Dell M1330 as well. After resume the disk spins down regularly and then sounds like it is parking. It then spins up after about a 1-2 second wait. This has only happened since Jaunty, intrepid was fine.

i read the man page for hdparm:

-S Set the standby (spindown) timeout for the drive. This value is used by the drive to determine how long to wait (with no disk activity) before turning off the spindle motor to save power.

and this would seem to be what is happening - the OS believes it is still suspended and is parking the drive even though it is on mains and resumed.

I've manually done this:

$ sudo hdparm -S 0 /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 setting standby to 0 (off)

.. let's see what happens