> > I have recently noticed a strange phenomenon where occasionally I get 
> video freezing then (in the resulting silence) I hear a HDD spin-up and 
> the video continues.
> > It only happens very occasionally and I haven't been able to establish 
> a pattern of events (other than being able to hear a HDD start to spin).
> > My initial assumption is that it may be buffering footage to RAM, 
> spinning down the HDD and then not spinning it up again in time to 
> prevent the freeze. Any other thoughts?
> > I will continue looking into it myself but at this stage I cannot even 
> think of any keywords to google.
> 
> Are you running in laptop mode?
> 
> Mike

I will have to check but I am running Mythbuntu and as far as I could tell they did not include any modifier for power management settings so I guess I'm modifying these types of settings from the terminal. By laptop mode do you mean a power management type setting? I'll do some searching on it and see what I can turn up.
Thanks for your reply,
Glen