A method is disclosed for reducing disk expansion effects while writing spiral reference patterns on a disk of a disk drive. The disk drive comprises control circuitry and a head disk assembly (HDA) for positioning a head radially over the disk. In the method, an external spiral servo writer is used to control a radial location of the head for writing a plurality of the spiral reference patterns between inner and outer seed tracks. A head velocity profile is adjusted for writing each spiral reference pattern to account for thermal disk expansion. The head internal to the disk drive is used to read the spiral reference patterns in order to write product servo bursts to the disk that define a plurality of radially-spaced circular data tracks.