After reading some online reviews about HDD noise a few years ago I decided to get a WD Red Plus 6TB. Unfortunately the HDD turned out to be very noisy and much noisier than a much older WD 2TB drive that I have that was practically silent. What are the quietest internal HDDs for home use in your experience?
Thought about getting a NAS, and putting it in another room?
SSDs!
There’s hardly any choice in spinning rust hard drives, anymore. WD has over 60% of the market, and Seagate has most of the remainder.
WD Red drives are a good choice, but NOT the plus or pro models… Either the original or the “NAS” models are likely to be best.
But more than that, YOU can download the spec sheets for the model of hard drive you are considering, and check both the acoustic level (dB) and power consumption (because manufacturers will sometimes have extremely hot drives in their low-power product lines), yourself.
That said, the last time I capitulated and bought a Seagate hard drive that was supposed to be very quiet and low power, it turned out to perform terribly (disk access stalling out), and had a very irritatingly loud vibration that only showed up after it was mounted in a case. So Seagate when right back on my banned vendor list.
But also keep an eye on warranties! Don’t get fooled into saving $5 by getting a drive with just a 1-year warranty instead of the 3-year coverage.
I’ve got 5x 6TB Seagate Ironwolf drives behind me in a btrfs RAID10 array.
The 120mm fan is the loudest component of that system, even when resilvering the array.
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I have 4TB seagate barracudas (x3) in Fractal Define S and never heard any noticeable HDD noise from it. I do have it in a vented cabinet now but I use to have it on top of the desk next to my monitor and even then I never really heard any noise from it. What I had before these was a Seagate 3TB constellation drive that was freaking loud!
In general it may be best to stay away from enterprise or NAS drives in your PC if noise is a concern. I will say that I do have 3TB Seagate NAS drives in my NAS but that is located in another room although I don’t believe they were noisy at all at least not over the fan noise.
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I think it’s going to vary a lot on a model-by-model basis. I don’t think rules of thumb will hold true for all drives. I think your best hope (aside from going SSD or NAS) is finding a reviewer that includes sound readings in their reviews.
While I did just say rules of thumb won’t help, I agree with avoiding enterprise drives because they are often installed to go in incredibly loud servers. I have 4 Toshiba MG07ACA12TE enterprise drives and the thrashing during non-sequential I/O is pretty noticeable. However, the previous desktop-grade DT01ACA300 drives were not obnoxious. Both are 7200 RPM.
If you’re getting into many-TB HDDs, I would encourage you to ensure you have all that data backed up in 2 places if it’s not easily replaceable.
Where the drive goes can make a big difference. My desktop, a tower, acoustically couples somehow to the hard board floor it is on, which resonates broadcasting low frequency sound. To avoid this I spin down the drives when possible. One can get special cases and enclosures that significantly reduce noise, or there’s cheap “noise isolation strips” or “anti-vibration” screws; I haven’t tried these.
I have a bunch of Seagate Exos 18TB drives. They are quiet enough for me. I keep them spun up 100% of the time
I rarely hear them over the delta/san ace fans 
Depends on what level of quite you are looking for. If you are like me and want the quietest possible system then give up on HDDs. I bought a few different drives 2-3 years ago to try find a quite one. In my experience they always ended up the loudest part of my system (Especially because windows 10 constantly spins them up for no reason).
So I ended up building a NAS for all my HDDs so I could finally have a perfectly silent system and still have bulk storage.
If you are stuck with HDDs I have one trick that might help. Some drives are loud because the top casing resonates, if you tape a mass like a couple of coins or a piece of rubber to it cuts a lot of the noise. Combine that with rubber isolation mounts it can help a lot. But even then they will still be the loudest part of a system that idles with very low or 0 rpm fans.
I have a Toshiba 3TB air-filled HDD inside my all-in-one PC since 2019. My normal head position is about 65cm in from of the all-in-one. I can’t hear anything from the idle HDD. Sometimes can hear disk access at night.
If you want quiet HDDs, perhaps get the largest capacity air-filled HDD from Toshiba. If I recall correctly, it tops out at 8TB single drive.
Large-capacity HDDs these days are all helium-filled which produces regular “dong” to maintain the actuator in good condition. I can’t recall the interval on top of my head, perhaps anywhere between 2 to 5 min.
The “dong” will resonate with the surface or structure the HDD is placed. A sturdy case (like those from InWin with 1mm steel sheet) and some rubber cushion should mitigate the resonance. Disk access isn’t particularly noisier, and for the best part the “dong” will skip if disk is accessed frequently.
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