Comment 3 for bug 612969

I'm running 13.04 on my Asus F202X, and have this same problem: My harddisk is constantly spinning up and down and then parks (making clicking sounds):

Click -- spin down -- spin up; Click -- spin down -- spin up; Click -- spin down -- spin up.

This goes in about 10 sec sycles. Usually the time between two clicks is 10 sec, but sometimes 7, sometimes 5 sec, sometimes 3 sec, and occasionally 20 sec. And then sometimes it remains quiet for several minutes, even for hours. I'm sure this will break the disk prematurely.

issuing the following stopped this behaviour:
sudo hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda