XPS 1530 7200 RPM Hard Drive Whine, DVD Drive Noise on Start Up

My new XPS 1530 has a couple of noise issues and I am wondering if they indicate serious problems, if their are easy workarounds, or if I just have to deal with them.

First, the Hitachi 7200 rpm (200 gb) hard drive makes an intermittant high-pitched whining noise during regular use. The noise is quiet, detectable only when background noise is minimal (e.g. in the library), but it is very annoying. It seems to be coming from the left palm rest area, so I assume it is the hard drive. Is some noise from the hard drive unavoidable?

Second, the DVD slot load drive is very noisy when the machine starts up / returns from hibernation as windows checks to see if there is a disk in the drive. I think that this noise is standard (drive is quiet when actually in use), but I was wondering if it is possible to stop windows from automatically checking for a disk on start up (so that this noise doesn't happen every time I turn on the machine).

Thanks!

 

I've never had a quiet optical drive in a laptop. The quietest one I had was in a MacBook which was also a slot loader.