Opinion for a fast and reliable 6TB storage drive: WD Gold vs Seagate IronWolf Pro vs IronWolf?

[Quartz11]

If I can find these for similar enough price for the 6TB size, which would you go with and why? 

My usage is for a storage drive, and I generally do a fair amount of digital photograph post-processing, so reading from a storage drive, processing in something like Lightroom or CaptureOne Pro, writing to disk, browsing stored photographs and RAW files, etc.

 

Seagate IronWolf Pro ST6000NE000 

https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/ironwolf-pro-18tb-DS1914-16-2011US-en_US.pdf

 

Seagate IronWolf ST6000VN0033 

https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/ironwolf-12tbDS1904-9-1707US-en_US.pdf

 

WD Gold WD6003FRYZ

https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/internal-drives/wd-gold/product-brief-wd-gold-2579-810192.pdf

 

These data sheets give some information, but omit other relevant information.  I want to know things like access time, etc.  I'm guessing none of these will be particularly quiet, though the WD Gold will possibly be the overall loudest (29dBa/36dBa) vs (28dBa/32dBa for IronWolf Pro 6TB or 27dBa/28dBa for IronWolf non-Pro.)  Though weird thing about acoustic data: it differs from these data sheets for Seagate compared to another set of data sheets for the very same product IDs...  I think the summary tables show some very optimistic or plain incorrect values.  I'm using the ones from the these two data sheets instead:

https://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/ironwolf/en-us/docs/100844774c.pdf

https://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/ironwolf/en-us/docs/100807039h.pdf

 

Thank you.

[dizmo]

I really don't think you're going to see any difference between the three.

If you're worried about noise, you should just have a case with proper sound deadening and the drives really wouldn't matter at all.

[Quartz11]

I'm not too worried about the noise, but certainly it's nicer to have something less noisy.  I have my drive not mounted to a case with screws but sitting on some thick Sorbothane strips, which dampen much of the noise.  But the seeking noise can still be heard.  Using a 6TB WD Black now, but I need to move it to another computer at home which just had an old 1TB drive that failed.  Figured I'd swap in my WD Black and get an upgrade for my new computer in its place.