Sorry. I confused the issue by mentioning that.
It was meant as a reference to modern drives taking longer to psin up and recently the trouble I've been having getting them working in our legacy products (PATA change to SATA is causing troubles but fixable ones).

As luck would have it, our Seagate rep is in tomorrow and the question about the Momentus is in our brief to ask, since it isn't in their technical documents.
Hopefully the person asking will remember for me.

I'll look about the kernel, it'll involve asking someone to do me a favour, or a lot of time on my part looking at setting up a development environment. Thanks for the walk through mlord !