Why would anyone chuck them?

My friend bought both formats, and he likes them both. He's been snapping up HD-DVD movies at the bargain prices since Toshiba capitulated to the BDA.

The only reason to "chuck discs" is if they're bad. Oh and your headline is foolish, the format isn't rising from the grave at all. Most of these dual-format drives were in R&D for quite some time.

are there separate production lines for noisy drives

Are the drives in media PCs actually quiet? Obviously yeah a CD and DVD player has a drive that doesn't make a noise when it's in operation, but thus far I've found all drives bought for PCs are really noisy.....

are they still all as noisy as say, my X360 optical drive is? and if so, why then doesn't anyone sell the drives like are in DVD and CD players, as separate drives....

on that topic, why is the X360 so noisy just being on anyway; my PS2s are only noisy when they play those blue-backed discs (makes them sound like they're about to die).

Zupakomputer silence those drives

Zupakomputer there are tools available to force the cd/dvd drive in a pc to run at a slower speed i.e X1 which should greatly reduce the generated noise.