Songbird freezes waiting for external drive to spin up

My music is on an external USB drive that goes into standby automatically after 10min without file access. But it does stay mounted to the file system. When I then access a file (i.e. start playing music) it takes a couple of seconds to spin up again. Songbird keeps crashing (=freezes forever) once I start playing a song that is located on that drive in standby mode. The FolderSync addon also fails to do its work when the drive is in standby.

What is this? Is there already a bug report? Or is it not Songbird's fault?

Songbird 1.1.2, Build 1042 (20090331141711)
Ubuntu Linux 9.04