The deal is, Apple decided that it wants to read the temperature of the hard drive and adjust fan speed based on that. Sounds logical, except that apparently if you replace the hard drive the one you are replacing with doesn't give the data to OS X the way it expects (if even at all?) and then OS X flips out and says, 'something is wrong, better max these things out!" and the fan speed is set at 100%.
So the deal is, nope, you can't replace it with a non Apple drive without the fans maxing out (afaik), but you can keep the fans from doing so, an app like HDD Fan Control should do it. I'm not going to link it because the whole question almost seems like a shady ad for HDD Fan Control, but just incase it isn't I replied with some insight.