Hard drive noises

The acid test would be to run a game or a game-based benchmark. If the problem appears there, then you know it's normal. If not, then indeed AE is the culprit and we once more can only advise to update the graphics driver, check hardware acceleration settings and all that. Excessive fan activity can indicate broken drivers where AE is simply hammering your GPU and it doesn't respond correctly, getting too hot and then the fans max out. Same for your NVMe/ SSD drives. If they can't keep with AE's cache, they, too, may simply rev up to compensate.

Mylenium

Your fans are spinning to cool your graphics card and your processors. You have SSDs so your drives arent spinning up.

It is normal on many of the machines that I work with for the hard drive to spin a lot while rendering and with other challeninging tasks.

That's not really useful. You have not provided any info about your system and what specifically you may or may not have observed by monitoring task manager/ resource monitor. There could literally be a gazillion reasons why your cooling fans rev up from the computer simply being too crammed and having poor internal airflow design to of course genuine issues with e.g. GPU acceleration sending your system into a death spiral. Anyway, you need to be much, much more specific.

Mylenium