It’s working!
I followed the details you provided here:
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/SetSpinDownTimeOnMaxtorOneTouch
I originally avoided this page as I’m not using a Maxtor drive (I’m using a Seagate) so maybe that should be renamed to be inclusive of all drives just so people don’t cast it to one side.
I added the rc.local edit:
# Kill the onetouch_detect processes so that the drive can spin down
/bin/killall onetouch_detect
I also un-commented the “return 1” line at the bottom.
Lastly I renamed sda1 to sdb1 in rc.local and then typed “mount” in telnet to check that the disk had been mounted with “noatime”.
I did this by unmounting the drive using a Knoppix boot CD (just a matter booting Knoppix with the drive attached and then shutting down) and then using Ext3 IFS to access the disk in Windows. I couldn’t edit the files using Knoppix but I could in Windows. Then I used a nifty little utility called dos2unix to convert the line breaks to unix. Probably the long way around I know but it worked in the end!
I haven’t made any edits to the crontab but perhaps I should as I have a feeling the drive might wake up due to the clock being reset every hour? We’ll see.
Thanks so much for your help and I hope this thread will help others who hit the same problem.