Looks like one of the qotom/topton boxes you can find on aliexpress.

Can also pick them up with preinstalled *sense from Protectli (which I did I regretted nothing, totally great experience.)

Nah, nothing to do with noise.

As far as I’m aware it’s a feature to control power to the disk. Look it up to confirm if you’re interested, but I think power delivered on that pin keeps the hdd off. Cutting the power (or snipping the power cable in my case) causes it to function normally. Plenty of people have bought these drives and assumed they are dead (including me!) when plugged into a regular PSU, which just supplies the power. I assume enterprise servers allow you to turn the 3.3v pin on and off. I suspect it’s more useful in datacenters etc to restart problematic drives & run diagnostics etc remotely before having to go and actually find the thing in the server/rack/aisle of racks/warehouse of racks etc.

Someone here will know more than me.

Pretty sure they are all WD-era Ultrastars now.

Only gotcha I ever found with them (and some shucked WD reds several years ago I think) is to disable the 3.3v pin. Plenty of different methods for that, but I just snipped it out of the power cable. Lots of posts online explaining it, it’s not an ultrastar specific deal.

I have six of them running on the other side of my microscopic apartment and I can only hear the PSU fans. I never even really thought about them being enterprise until your comment, I just found HGST drives fantastic and kept riding that train. They are definitely not louder than the WD red’s I have run.

Obviously I’m looking forward to the silence of an ssd future as much as anyone else.

Not sure about seagate drives as I’ve never used them, but I’ve been using ultrastar drives for years and found them more or less inaudible.

They are owned by WD now, and I’m not a huge fan of that as the only drives I’ve ever had die are WD’s about a decade ago. Had some regular red’s since then and they have been fine. Ownership by WD doesn’t seem to have enshittified ultrastar so far, as far as I can tell.

I run a number of Shelly devices on an iOT vlan with opnsense, but I used the integration- could that be an option?

I found a couple of the shelly devices (the humidity & temperature sensor and the smoke alarm) needed to be able to access HA to send updates so I created an opnsense alias to allow them just to access the ip it’s on. I could see MQTT being useful for these maybe?

I also have a couple of plugs and plus 1pm’s that just sit isolated on the vlan and get accessed by HA from the LAN. The integration was super easy to setup for these.

But this post didn’t suggest Docker, it suggested a VM. This would be a totally sensible thing to do as you can just recreate it if you mess it up. Virtualbox works fine on Windows and Linux. Install it and spin up a distro.

Mate, the suggestions you have been given for VMs and docker are to help you recover easily should you mess up. If you are going to moan about that…maybe just install bare metal and get on with it yourself?

I have two window units and a switch on the wall wired in to turn power on and off to them like yours. It would be the same as pulling the plug. I added a Shelly relay to each of them to turn them on and off via home assistant.

I can’t change any settings on them as they are physical dials on the front of the unit. However, I generally keep the dials the same and just turn them on and off with the relays.

There’s a warning not to turn the units off and then back on in 3 minutes (I’ve seen this on quite a few units), but I think lots of units only enable the fan if they are switched on in that time frame as a precaution. The compressor comes on after the warning period passes. No idea why.

I use a Broadlink RM4 for exactly this! Works great once set up. Had to let it connect to the internet to set up the first time, then blocked it on my iOT vlan so only Home assistant can talk to it. Has worked without any intervention for several years.