You might have to live on a busy street in NYC to understand. Ride share drivers in particular will just LAY on the horn for many tens of seconds, even minutes straight.
When you're NYC and you haven't figured out that we should get rid of a lot of public (free!) parking spots for delivery and loading zones, you wind up with a lot of double and triple parking.
Combine those two things, you'll get noise complaints about honking. Seriously, you have no idea how bad it can be!
I have very similar requirements, but I'm currently using a Pi with some external drives since that's how I started out. Would you mind sharing what you ended up buying? My place is pretty small, so the 'quiet' requirement is one I care about a lot. Personally I'd love to get something passively cooled, but I haven't seen much!