Comment 15 for bug 1281588

John, just to confirm, do you find the WD acts like the Samsung drives? It looks like I have exactly the same one, the WDC WD40EZRX-00SPEB0, and that's the one that always wakes up whenever it is polled (and I tested this on 30 minute poll intervals, which means it had been spun down 20 minutes but still woke up). But I think from what you said that yours doesn't wake up when it's polled, so long as it is given more than ten minutes to spin down between polls.

Apart from setting a saner default polling interval in udisks2, perhaps it would be a good solution to have a configuration setting in gnome-disks (or at least in udisks2's conf file) that allows you to set the polling interval. I don't mind my drive waking up once a day for a check, but every 30 minutes just seems silly.