iPod Classic Problem

Since there is a hard drive inside your iPod it's certainly normal to feel and hear it spin. It should only be doing this every few minutes when the music that is loaded into the buffer runs out. Skipping around between songs will increase the amount of drive activity. It's also normal for a slight delay for the album artwork to pop up. Make sure you have the latest software running on your iPod. I believe it's 1.02 but I could be wrong. You can update it through iTunes. The updates have greatly improved the speed of the interface among other things.