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.

But this post didn’t suggest Docker, it suggested a VM. This would be a totally sensible thing to do as you can just recreate it if you mess it up. Virtualbox works fine on Windows and Linux. Install it and spin up a distro.

Mate, the suggestions you have been given for VMs and docker are to help you recover easily should you mess up. If you are going to moan about that…maybe just install bare metal and get on with it yourself?