In this case the JMS578 on the PCB seems to be the problem since having its own ideas about spin down behavior
Changing physical properties of the HDD and rebooting results in a "new" drive /dev/disk/by-label/ is missing and SDA is unmounted, not just JMS578 spindown behavior.
Is this behavior caused by a bad Seagate firmware ( drive pulled from an old usb storage ), blacklisting or something else ?