Running a separate hard drive

[northwestern]

I have a HP laptop (dv5 1110en) with windows seven, I run Ubuntu successfully from a external hard drive (Buffalo HD2). When I leave the computer for a while the machine goes into sleep mode as it should, but the Buffalo hard drive carries on spinning, is this normal or is there a way to make the external HD power down.

Regards
Northwestern

[Basher101]

not sure how its with external drives, but check the power options and see if the option "spin down hard drive when possible" is enabled.

[northwestern]

Thanks for your speedy reply, looked at the power options, it mentions nothing about disc run down.

The external drive also keeps running when I press the power button to put it to sleep.

Regards
Nortwestern