Annoying stall before open/save dialog with firewire drive attached

I think it's the wrong choice to have the stall happen before opening the dialog box instead of letting you get to the dialog and decide from there. If you want something on the external drive, or if that's where you want to save a file, then it should spin up the drive. It shouldn't spin up the drive unless a request is made of it. More often than not, I don't need anything from the external drive and yet I have to suffer the stall and I think it's wrong to spin up the drive when there is no explicit access requested. Better to just leave it sleeping. Spin up/spin down is unnecessary wear and tear, I would think.