Mine arrived today, cheap black plastic drive with a sticker on it. Flipping it over reveals a "Chips & More" logo which explains what is going on:
 
Chips & More is basically an emergency electronics distributor. They are a company you go to when your production line has been overwhelmed and you need to fill orders fast. That is precisely what happened to NI with the big sale they did. They ran out of stock, and generally most custom production lines like their nice metal drive have a few months lead time. So they contracted Chips and More to quickly get them stuff to ship out.

Sycraft
Mine arrived today, cheap black plastic drive with a sticker on it. Flipping it over reveals a "Chips & More" logo which explains what is going on:
 
Chips & More is basically an emergency electronics distributor. They are a company you go to when your production line has been overwhelmed and you need to fill orders fast. That is precisely what happened to NI with the big sale they did. They ran out of stock, and generally most custom production lines like their nice metal drive have a few months lead time. So they contracted Chips and More to quickly get them stuff to ship out.

Yep simply because they didn't wanted to anticipate before and have unsold stoks  ....so let's gets the orders and then react !

Just because the drives came in plastic cases doesn't mean that they were inexpensive - low volume, rush processing isn't cheap.  
 
I'm happy that N.I. sold more than they anticipated and hopefully they made a killing.  That'll mean that they have more money for developing new goodies for future versions of Komplete.