Is there a way to tell my laptop that, when it's on power, it should just
leave the !@*#! drive on all the time, no matter what?

The problem is that, of course, it spins down just often enough that it has
to start up almost immediately anyway.

I have

---
atactl wd0 setidle 0
atactl wd0 setstandby 0
---

in /etc/apm/line, but it doesn't seem to do what I want.

BTW, is it really a feature for 'setstandby 0' to put the device in standby
mode immediately?  I'd think it'd make more sense not to do that, since you're
in the process of disabling the standby timer.

Actually, in general, I think setting the timers should not affect the drive
mode.  As a concrete example, I have
	setstandby 600
in my /etc/apm/battery - the result of which is that, if I unplug the laptop,
the drive is spun down and then *IMMEDIATELY* spun back up, to finish writing
logs to disk.  This is, at best, silly.

-s