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Western Digital · NAS drive · WD20EFPX

WD Red Plus 2TB

Built for 2- to 8-bay NAS boxes, and that's as far as WD's rating goes.

Capacity
2 TB
Recording
CMR
Speed
5,400 rpm
Warranty
3 years
Workload
180 TB/yr
Rated for
Up to 8 bays
Failure rate
No failure data

Good for

  • A NAS in the lounge or a bedroom
  • RAID, SHR and ZFS rebuilds

Not for

  • Boxes with more than 8 bays
  • Heavy daily writes (180 TB a year rating)

Updated 27 Oct 2026 · Method 2.0

Should you buy the WD Red Plus 2 TB?

It's a good match for a 2- or 4-bay box that sits somewhere you can hear it. Drives at 5,400 rpm run quieter and cooler than the 7,200 rpm lot, and they're still quick enough for gigabit. CMR, thankfully. SMR and parity rebuilds don't get on.

Watch out for

Treat that bay rating as a hard limit. Anything larger wants a pro or data-centre drive. Warranty's three years and the workload rating is 180 TB a year. At 2 TB that's 90 full passes of the drive a year, and a monthly scrub uses twelve of them before you've written anything.

No Backblaze failure rate for this one. They don't run enough of them, if any, for a figure worth quoting. WD's datasheet puts it at 21 dB idle and 26 dB seeking. Power draw is 2.4 W idle and 4 W working on WD's figures, or 21 kWh a year if it spends the whole year idling. Four of them in SHR or RAID 5 give 6 TB usable, or 5.5 TB once Windows has done its binary maths on it.

Specifications

Each value links to the Western Digital page or datasheet it came from.

WD Red Plus 2TB specifications
Drive type NAS source for Drive type (documents.westerndigital.com, opens in new tab)
Capacity 2 TB source for Capacity (documents.westerndigital.com, opens in new tab)
Spindle speed 5,400 rpm source for Spindle speed (documents.westerndigital.com, opens in new tab)
Recording technology CMR source for Recording technology (documents.westerndigital.com, opens in new tab)
Cache 64 MB source for Cache (documents.westerndigital.com, opens in new tab)
Interface SATA 6Gb/s source for Interface (documents.westerndigital.com, opens in new tab)
Form factor 3.5in source for Form factor (documents.westerndigital.com, opens in new tab)
Max sustained transfer 180 MB/s source for Max sustained transfer (documents.westerndigital.com, opens in new tab)
Workload rating 180 TB/yr source for Workload rating (documents.westerndigital.com, opens in new tab)
MTBF / MTTF 1,000,000 hours source for MTBF / MTTF (documents.westerndigital.com, opens in new tab)
Rated for NAS bays (max) 8 bays source for Rated for NAS bays (max) (documents.westerndigital.com, opens in new tab)
Warranty 3 years source for Warranty (documents.westerndigital.com, opens in new tab)
Power at idle 2.4 W source for Power at idle (documents.westerndigital.com, opens in new tab)
Power in use 4 W source for Power in use (documents.westerndigital.com, opens in new tab)
Noise at idle 21 dB source for Noise at idle (documents.westerndigital.com, opens in new tab)
Noise when seeking 26 dB source for Noise when seeking (documents.westerndigital.com, opens in new tab)

Sources: documents.westerndigital.com