When new, I didn't think that an SE with MiniScribe disk was all that noisy. Third party disks (eg SuperMac and Rodime) were equally noisy, as were PC/XT/AT hard disks. The later Sony disks used in the SE family were quieter, but they had an impressive failure rate (an Apple recall) and Sony never made another hard disk.

For shear noise, I'll vote for the Seagate ST506 family used in Profile drives.