NOISY HARD DRIVE, CLUNKING OUT OF SLEEP

The HD is generally silent except when coming out of sleep, during which you get a fair amount of definitely mechanical clunking and clattering from the unit as it spins up. Once up and running, all noise aside from perhaps the normal slight hum/whir, are gone.
I'm fairly sure that it's done this for as long as I've had this new iMac, is not getting any worse, and hasn't so far caused any other sorts of problems at all. I suppose I might be looking for some warm 'n fuzzy feedback saying that it's no biggie, nothing to be that concerned about.
In the meantime, I keep everything backed up to two external drives and am willing to ping AppleCare on it, at least to get the problem registered with them. Any other good advice?
TIA.

Try running the Disk utility application found in the utilities folder to see if it reports any errors when you verify the disk and check permissions. Disk Utility will also report the SMART status indicating whether the drive error parameters indicate it is in a failing state that would require replacement. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T. for more info regarding the capabilities of SMART.  The smartest thing you mentioned is that you maintain a backup. I too maintain two separate backups just in case.

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