Vibrations: Coordinate the use of a selection of dense and moderately loose foam insulation pieces from you local hardware store. Put them under the drive. Alternatively, buy a longer cable and set the drive on the floor (also on foam).
Noise (and vibrations): Set up a WiFi bridge to connect the drive located in some other room far, far away. The bottleneck will be the WiFi versus USB 3 connection. Play with dedicating the priority connection in the router as needed. Or just run a dedicated hard-wire ethernet with a switch between the two locations.
Just connected a USB hub as an extender. The drive is now on carpet and will hopefully be silenced. I could previously hear this drive spin up and down while in the living room downstairs under my office, transmitted through my desk to the floor.
As stated, one goal is to have the drive attached so Backblaze will back it up.
For 4 bay models, the Akitio version (Thunder3 Quad X) OWC sells* is quieter than OWC Thunderbays (though, to be fair, I haven’t had a bake-off in the same room.)
OWC’s single drive enclosures are also loud, though I suppose that depends a bit on what drive is installed internally.
To the OP: I mitigate drive sound by putting them under the desk, suspended in a wire raceway screwed to the desktop’s underside.
*can’t find it on OWC’s website or amazon, excepting the windows-only version
As has been discussed before, G-Technology is just a subsidiary of WD. Unless the cases, power supply etc are significantly better you’re not going to see much difference since they use the same drive mechanisms.
Don’t know what Rogier is seeing in Santa Barbara, but it’s probably not the mechanism, as we’ve gone over before.
Backblaze’s report on consumer drives for 2019 recently came out. This year, as in years past, the best mechanisms were found to have been HGST. If you want to cobble together an HGST mechanism with the case/power supply of your choice it’ll possibly be better than any branded external drive, but will take a bit more work to find a good case, and might cost a bit more money too. (It’s near-impossible to easily find branded externals using mechanisms.)
The brand is still around. The top executives of Hitachi/HGST basically took over at Western Digital (as least one wag called it a reverse takeover, a la Apple buying NeXT), and HGST’s former product lineup, including Ultrastar and Deskstar drives, are now branded as Western Digital. And the HGST-brand drive units Backblaze bought in bulk are still made and sold, as a quick check of newegg and amazon show.