Drives like this are hermetically sealed with an inert gas like argon or helium on the inside. Even the presence of oxygen and nitrogen molecules can compromise the drive. If dust is getting to the moving parts of your hard drive, it's toast no matter where it's installed.
My NAS uses a pair of SAS drives, and they make noises at boot up that would be concerning in a desktop. They're quite obnoxious. But I keep them in part of the house where they don't bother me.
Well I have no experience with these particular drives, but they do seem to have 11 platters. Which is beyond insane as far as I'm concerned. More platters means more moving parts, more friction more noise (all other things being equal).
Tell that to my IBM 10GB 10.000 RPM U2W SCSI from back then. To this day I have never witnessed a noisier harddrive... But that PC was pretty epic, including the biggest mf of a mainboard I ever had (the SCSI controller was onboard).
not sure what you're on about, i have some cheap 500GB USB 3 drives from like 2016 lying around and even those can happily deal with sustained writes over 130MB/s.
You've made me uncertain if I've somehow never noticed this before, so I gave it a shot. I've been dd-ing /dev/random onto one of those drives for the last 20 minutes and the transfer rate has only dropped by about 4MB/s since I started, which is about the kind of slowdown I would expect as the drive head gets closer to the center of the platter.
EDIT: I've now been doing 1.2GB/s onto an 8 drive RAID0 (8x 600GB 15k SAS Seagates) for over 10 minutes with no noticable slowdown. That comes out to 150MB/s per drive, and these drives are from 2014 or 2015. If you're only getting 60MB/s on a modern non-SMR HDD, especially something as dense as an 18TB drive, you've either configured something wrong or your hardware is broken.
I've found that the only thing you can hear through a closed basement door are noisy high speed fans, e.g. from used 19" servers, disks produce much less noise.
Nah, I'm living outside the US, my home is made from proper bricks and concrete. A bit slower to build but rather good when it comes to sound insulation. I could imagine with those strand board walls that might be a problem though.