My mechanical drives aren't quite as quiet as yours, but they are pretty quiet.

My current server has three drives in it, over its five year life it has had four drives fail. One Toshiba and the three WDCs.

Some of the intermittently fell off the bus, some permanently failed to appear. A couple of them seemed to work when I plugged them into my external SATA dock.

Maybe there is something odd with my server hardware ?

But this is why I don't mess about with non mirror arrays. With my three mirrored drives in my ZFS I just don't stress about drive failures causing any real hassle. And drives are cheap nowadays

My previous servers, one Dell desktop machine and one Dell PowerEdge server with a five drive SCSI RAID array had zero drive failures in over 10 years of life (right up until the RAID card itself failed). I think I got very lucky...

I think we have six SSDs in use in the house, one Intel, one Apple (think it is a Samsung) and the rest Samsung retail ones. So far, zero failures on the SSDs.