WD Red drives are not strictly for NAS usage. These drives are recommended for any type of RAID arrays, NAS or server usage or any other 24/7 purpose. The additional features (the sensor for example) contribute to better safety while in such environments and type of usage since it poses more threat to the drive compared to regular single-drive desktop usage.
To me this sounds like marketing speech without having any real technical relevance.
These drives are built more robust and handle heat better too.
According to my information Green and Red are physically the same drives. The only difference is the added tiny vibration sensor which is easily overestimated as a proper metal casing will neutralise vibrations quickly and only the real server/enterprise drives have proper vibration sensors, making them suitable to stack many disks close to each other - 40 disks in a Norco casing for example.
I often hear arguments that Red is faster, consumes less power and generates less heat than Green. But i think this is a misconception, caused by an improper review that tested a WD Green with 666GB platters against a model with 1TB platters. The latter will use one less platter to achieve the same capacity and thus will consume less power and thus generate less heat. Higher capacity platters also result in higher data density, meaning more sectors per track, meaning more sectors per revolution (rpm) which results in higher sequential throughput performance.
In other words, Green and Red are physically pretty much equal and the difference attributed to them is caused by an improper review which people take for granted. However, both Green (EARX i think) and Red had both 750GB and 1000GB platter models, so comparing apples with oranges results in faulty conclusions.
It is true that when used in a regular desktop the WD Red will behave more or less just like a WD Green as the additional features won't be needed and won't be used (TLER for example).
That is not true. TLER doesn't just disable itself. The drive itself does not know it is part of a RAID array. And you do not need nor want TLER for higher quality RAID implementations such as software RAID under BSD UNIX or Linux - such as many NAS products like Synology and Qnap also use.
TLER can also introduce risks, because it effectively kills your last line of defence in trying to get your data back, in case redundancy fails. Also TLER for RAID0 or concatenating arrays will introduce the same risk. You only want TLER if you really need it, which is: Hardware RAID or Windows FakeRAID (Intel/AMD/Promise/Silicon Image/JMicron/ASMedia/Marvell).
As for the extra year of warranty (or 2 years extra if you live outside of the EU),
research from BackBlaze suggests that WD Greens fail most in their first year, and much less in their second and third year. If true, this would render the additional warranty much less relevant.
For the manufacturer WD Red is a nice way to earn more money from essentially the same product, but for the consumer i can see little benefit in most circumstances. As usual the manufacturer benefits from FUD; misinformation, vague marketing speech and obfuscation. It all adds to the feeling consumer get that they need more expensive drives for your NAS, which 95%+ of the time is not required at all.
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