300GB Seagte HD tries to spin up after a period of inactivity but Freezes XP System

[j4k]

HI guys.. i'm going crazy with a supposedly small but irritating issue...
i recently bought a 300GB seagate drive for storing my Digital images and installed it as secondary internel HD with a 80pin cable and as a Slave on iDE 1...( Ide0 being allocatedtomy eralier80GB OS and Boot up disk
problem is it works fine at boot up ..except that when i try to access a file o it after 20 mionutes or so. i find it spins down and takes a good 40 seconds to get back to life.. thiswhen i have stopped shit down of HD in the poweroptions...
Worse, when ever i am on the net or using another program and try to acces it from within the application..it starts to try to Access but hangs up and freezes the system totally..
Sometimes I can access it (after 2o minutes) thorugh the windows explorer but yes it does seem to hang up and the HDaccess LED keeps on for a good 40 seconds or so before getting back to normal.... But almost always the system freezes when i access the HD through a application..Please help..I'm tired of all these reboots..
My system is a PIV 2.6 Mhz with 512 RAm and the primary HD is 80GB with 3 partitions and OS is WIn XP SP 2