Sadly, it is not easy to find an answer. I'm not able to find any reliable information on the actual RPM of this specific drive (I have the 4TB version). It is not specified in product manual or on published specs directly availabe from the company (at least materials in the packaging within my product box or readily available on the internet). Many external drives are 5400rpm. If you look on non-WD sites selling this exact drive you will find it advertised as either 5400RPM or 7200RPM. A deeper search of WD support forums suggests that WD will place either a 5400 or 7200 RPM drive in enclosures such as this at their manufacturing discretion, a statement which implies that they put in a drive that is readily available at the time of manufacture. To complicate things a bit more, WD also has some drives that are able to change their RPM speed to save energy, though that type of drive is not specified in this particular product in anything I can find. If your needs for an external drive require a specific sustained rate of data transfer (such as HD editing applications, etc.), I would recommend a drive that actually publishes its specs or is designed for a specific application - WD makes thunderbolt drives designed for Mac video editing. Another option would be to purchase a drive of known RPM and a separate enclosure for it.