Pretty sure they are all WD-era Ultrastars now.
Only gotcha I ever found with them (and some shucked WD reds several years ago I think) is to disable the 3.3v pin. Plenty of different methods for that, but I just snipped it out of the power cable. Lots of posts online explaining it, it’s not an ultrastar specific deal.
I have six of them running on the other side of my microscopic apartment and I can only hear the PSU fans. I never even really thought about them being enterprise until your comment, I just found HGST drives fantastic and kept riding that train. They are definitely not louder than the WD red’s I have run.
Obviously I’m looking forward to the silence of an ssd future as much as anyone else.
Not sure about seagate drives as I’ve never used them, but I’ve been using ultrastar drives for years and found them more or less inaudible.
They are owned by WD now, and I’m not a huge fan of that as the only drives I’ve ever had die are WD’s about a decade ago. Had some regular red’s since then and they have been fine. Ownership by WD doesn’t seem to have enshittified ultrastar so far, as far as I can tell.
Nah, nothing to do with noise.
As far as I’m aware it’s a feature to control power to the disk. Look it up to confirm if you’re interested, but I think power delivered on that pin keeps the hdd off. Cutting the power (or snipping the power cable in my case) causes it to function normally. Plenty of people have bought these drives and assumed they are dead (including me!) when plugged into a regular PSU, which just supplies the power. I assume enterprise servers allow you to turn the 3.3v pin on and off. I suspect it’s more useful in datacenters etc to restart problematic drives & run diagnostics etc remotely before having to go and actually find the thing in the server/rack/aisle of racks/warehouse of racks etc.
Someone here will know more than me.