This is my experience. I had them on my desk in a test bay to make sure they were all good to go and the only time I notice them is when they’re doing a lot of read/write movements. While they idle they’re quiet. So it depends on your use case, where the drive physically is, and what the drive is attached to. If it’s mounted with nice rubber dampers or something you might never hear them. If they’re mounted up to a loose chunk of metal they might rattle and drive you nuts.

I just grabbed a pair of 18TB Seagate Exos SATA drives - surprisingly quiet for what they are.

Greetings!

Not really self hosting a lot right now, but I’ve been spending a lot of time reengineering my network and fixing some things. Recently retired my loud and power-hungry pfsense server, replacing it with a Mikrotik rb5009, so setting that up has been a steep learning curve.

Most things are running on my Synology DS920+, except for a few raspberry pis.

• Jellyfin (docker)
• Kavita (docker)
• Home Assistant (pi4)
• Paperless-ngx (docker)
• PiHole (pi zero) currently broken
• Unifi controller (docker)
• Grafana (home assistant)
• InfluxDB (docker)
• LibreNMS (VM)