I have a Hitachi drive, so I guess my definition of very loud is different from most people's. The manufacture date is Sep 22 2006 so it is almost a year old now. In conclusion, I am satisfied with the noise level of my 360.

Also, are the DVD drives the only thing that differs between 360s? (Besides the HDMI port)

Many people don't necessarily notice even a moderately loud drive. I've played Gears of War and Dead Rising on a friend's 360, and never noticed any sound from the console. Then I tried the very atmospheric Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, and couldn't hear anything else during the sneaky bits.

It really depends on the situation after all. My laptop is attached to big stereo speakers, and the cd/cassette-player bit that has to be on has the loudest fan I've ever heard on a piece of electronics. Half of the time I don't notice it if I'm playing loud music, playing a game etc, but sometimes it really bugs the hell out of me.

I'm too lazy to go and check which one i have but it sounds like a blender :(

I just learned that I have the Hitachi LG drive. I admit that it's pretty noisy when I first put the disk in, but by the time the game starts, it's pretty quiet. Does anyone know which version is more likely to get red-ringed? .......Do I really want to know? :{

Your DVD drive does not have nothing to deal with you getting a RRoD. It all relies on the GPU overheating. Microsoft developed a poor cooling design for it. And as a result the GPU heats up rather quick, without a huge heatsink the hot air can not be transported out the system quickly. So no worries on the DVD drive. To be honest all drives are quiet just that if you pay more attention to it than the games itself, then that's when it annoy's you