Believe me. When you've used college computers which take up to 10 minutes to load, 10-30 seconds (30 being worse case) seems like a heartbeat. Interesting that you bring up the noise. While they deffinantly make it, I've never experienced a loud HDD. My old laptop, coming close to being 10 years old, is probably the loudest. But I only ever hear the HDD when there's otherwise complete silence. I got a WD on there aswell, but not sure on the colour. The problem you're probably facing is you've not got your music on loud enough!
I usually have a fan on and I hear it over that with headphones on I sit pretty close to my PC (it's on my desk, next to my monitor) which definitely makes a difference
