USB disk spin down time

[R Kimber]

I have just bought a Samsung 2TB external USB drive and it is formatted with
ext4.  It works fine, except that it automatically spins down very quickly
when it thinks it's not needed.  Since it takes nearly 5 seconds to spin up
after doing a 'save' this has started to become irritating.

How may I best control the time before it spins down?

There seems to be a smart disk spin-down daemon that might do it, called
ngflushd, but it is not in the repos.  Is there a standard Ubuntu way of
controlling the time before spin-down? And is there a command that spins it
up again?

- Richard.
-- 
Richard Kimber
Political Science Resources
http://www.PoliticsResources.net/