seagate power-down i/o issues

Hello:
For some reason, when my segate decides it's time to take a nap, it goes to standby (I'm ok with this).
What I'm not figuring out is when it goes to standby, the linux system forgets about it, but still has a mountpoint open, which means that when I try to read (doing a ls on the mountpoint), I get i/o errors. Anyone know why this is?
I've pasted my dmesg output below:
[944780.509213] usb 1-4: Product: FA GoFlex Desk
[944780.509214] usb 1-4: Manufacturer: Seagate
[944780.509216] usb 1-4: SerialNumber: NA0J76WN
[944780.509649] scsi8 : usb-storage 1-4:1.0
[944781.508888] scsi 8:0:0:0: Direct-Access Seagate FA GoFlex Desk 0155 P
Q: 0 ANSI: 4
[944781.509613] sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[944781.510230] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] 3907029167 512-byte logical blocks: (2.00 TB/1
.81 TiB)
[944781.510725] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[944781.510727] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 1c 00 00 00
[944781.511977] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doe
sn't support DPO or FUA
[944781.530640] sdb: sdb1
[944781.533256] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
[945669.815013] EXT3-fs: barriers not enabled
Thanks,

You need to configure the GoFlex drive to not go into standby. I'm not sure exactly how to do that. I had one once, but the drive failed quickly so I returned it to the bit bucket. It wasn't worth messing around with to get fixed. FWIW, I don't buy Seagate drives any longer, at least over 500GB. All their 1TB and larger drives run way too hot and don't have adequate spare sectors (no more than the 500GB drives) for long-term use. I've had 2 fail under warranty in the past few months. They (1.5TB 7200rpm Barracuda drives) run about 10-25 degrees F hotter than Western Digital 7200rpm 2TB drives, they generate bad sectors at a much higher rate, and the WD drives have about 4x the number of spare sectors. I used to purchase only Seagate drives, but their reliability has really degraded of the past few years, especially on the larger Barracuda discs, which I used for a lot of drive arrays.