I have two seagate 500G HDs and 3 Western digital 500G HDs. All are less than 14 months old (one is 2 weeks). None whine (and I have sensitive hearing) but the seagates are louder than the wds (more of a thump when moving heads, click about the same). FWIW, if you don't like noise the Noctua 120mm fans are fantastic (I have huge heat sinks on cpu and graphics processors).
I realise your talking about computers, and likely a mechanical noise, but i sometimes hear what you describe (a very high pitch tone, very annoying) just from electricals, radios in particular-that are turned off, mind you. Many would put it down to tinnitus, except it dissapears when the offending appliance is turned off at the wall.
This is a bad drive. I had a 500 gb one and the first time I ran it it emitted these really loud clicking noises. I read some reviews and found out a lot of people are having trouble with these drives (ie. dying after weeks or months). Returned it in a flash.
Yes, it sounds like an electrical tone. But the pitch increases as the drive spools up then is maintained at the high tone until the spindle spools down. I bought a computer on eBay with 2 SATA hard drives. One is Hitachi, the other Maxtor. Neither of them make the tone, but all but one of my Seagates do.... and my Samsung. Fortunately the sound can be masked with audio from the TV tuner or a table fan... just annoying if I want to work (view porn) in a quite space.
Could you post here some links of the reviews that you found critical issues with that 7200.11 500 Gb HD?