It can cause a chirping/squeaking sound and also has the potential to shorten the life of the hard drive due to increased load/unload cycles

This chirping really baffles me.

The chirp is loud enough to be annoying

If you go to forums(dot)seagate(dot)com and search on 'chirp', you'll find that a number of 1TB - 3TB Seagate SATA drives of more recent vintage, all chirp.