Thanks to this incredible solution by @NatZfr , I was finally able to FIX the horrible hard drive grinding noise EVERY time I pushed “Play” to start a Play in Editor session in Unreal 5.4.4! Simply go to Edit > Plugins and search for “Studio Telemetry”. Disable this and Restart the Editor when prompted. (If for some reason you cannot disable the plugin entirely, check out this post for an alternate solution).
Now, not only is the hard drive silent, but starting a play session is as fast as lightning!! 