HDD Fan stuck at a very noisy 5000 rpm - is this normal ??

I've had a Intel iMac for a while now (Oct 2006), and it's always seemed noisy but I just figured that was normal (coming from a jet-engine-fanned-noisy-PC background!). A colleague at work just bought one and he says his is really quiet so I started doing some investigation.
It seems the hard drive fan is always running at 5000RPM which seems VERY high to me. Temperature/fan speeds are :
Ambient air temp 27
CPU 1/2 core temp around 40
Disk temp around 31 (ie, not at all hot for a disk)
CPU fan speed 805
Optical fan speed 800
Hard drive fan speed 5000 !!!
The iMac isn't doing anything taxing at all. It's just used by my son who looks at web stuff and plays DVDs. The fan is running fast even on startup when the disk is cold.
I've tried resetting the SMC (unplug everything, leave it, then plug power lead in) and that makes no difference.
I'm sure this must be a fault, but before I take it into a service centre I'd like to be sure it's not something I can fix here
Thanks in advance for any help
Mike
20" Intel iMac   Mac OS X (10.4.10)  

I had a similar problem with my iMac. It turns out that my son was holding the power button in when he plugged in the power cord which caused the system to enter a programming mode where one or more of the fans run at high speed. I unplugged the system for about 20 seconds, plugged the power cord back in, and all was well.
Here's the article that provides the info:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304602
iMac G5 20 (iSight)   Mac OS X (10.4.2)  

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