Western Digital (WD) RED NAS hard drives a Ploy?

I see your point armornone, and can sympathise with it. But i think today's modern "desktop" class hard drives all operate in a manner halfway between the Green and Red series drives from my experience. Now while this will work in the NAS (I'm using Samsung SpinPoints as you'll see from my sig) there are still some "Green" features on drives like this, albeit not as much as a dedicated "Green" drive.

My Desktop acts a bit like a NAS itself. I rarely switch it off, it's always doing "something". This is where I identify with your argument. On the other hand, having drives in your NAS that are designed for that purpose can only help to lengthen the prospective time between issues from where I'm sitting. Spend enough time reading these forums, and you'll notice that the largest numbers of help requests posted are to do with problems with hard drives. The Red's are reletively new to market as a concept, so nobody really knows at this point if they will live up to the hype. But for a little extra, if/when the need arises for me to buy new drives, Red's will be what I get. My data is important to me, so I want to give it the best chance of survival without having to constantly buy replacement hardware because of failure, if I can.

The ethics of what WD are doing is (at this point in time), a lesser consideration. At least from where I sit.