Apparently, quiet high capacity drives don’t exist any longer, so that is not the question. I own several old Seagate Constellation drives which are whisper quiet, but they are small and I need to consolidate. I purchased a refurbished HGST HC520 a few months back and it isn’t too bad while spun down or idle. Even when not in use it isn’t too bad (except in the case of heavy random seeks, which aren’t common for me), but the spinning up is quite annoying. From what I can tell, aggressive power management has been a feature of WD drives for a while, which is why I switched to Seagate in the early 2010s. (None of the WD drives I’ve owned since the Re4s seem to respect power management settings in software.)

Some noise can be dampened, of course, and I do use rubber mounting parts, but that only gets you so far. Drives can be moved to a NAS so they aren’t arm’s length away, but my NAS is in the living room by the router, which isn’t much better.

So the question is, which is less bad, HGST HC or Seagate Exos? If HGST drives are using WD’s PWL “feature”, then that’s a non-starter as periodic clunks trigger me (I’ve heard it too many times, and it was always very bad). I do have an SSD, but I can’t afford to put all my data on SSDs.