Use a WD Red Plus 2TB NAS HDD drive as an external drive with Mac

The WD Red Plus 2TB NAS HDD is a bare SATA disk drive. You must put it in a drive enclosure in order to use it as an external drive with any computer. There is no "SATA to USB-C" cable or adapter.

OWC has many good quality SATA drive enclosures to choose among. Here is one example: https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-mercury-elite-pro

BTW, the WD Red Plus 2TB NAS HDD is a 5400 rpm drive, which has always been considered slow, especially by today's standards. If you are using it for backup only that may be ok, but don't expect high performance from that drive.

I would go with the StarTech enclosure. Macs can be picky about the drive enclosures. Plugable is another great brand, but they don't have a lot of selections. Like someone else mentioned, OWC Mercury Enclosures are good too. I personally prefer USB3 enclosures that support UASP in order to get the best transfers & prevent slower USB devices from interfering with transfers. I also prefer enclosures that support SMART...although macOS doesn't have the necessary driver to access SMART over USB, but it usually indicates a better quality enclosure using a better quality USB chipset.

Actually there are a number of SATA/USB adapters such as this one:

https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-USB-SATA-Adapter-Cable/dp/B071GRCGF4

If the drive is only going to be used infrequently, such an adapter would probably be sufficient. For daily use, an enclosure will be recommended as it will be more robust.

Regards.

Open Disk Utility. Select the drive. Then select Erase. In the Erase dialog, select GUID Partition Map and (imho) since this is a traditional HDD, select MacOS Extended (Journaled) format.

Others may recommend using APFS format because that's what Apple's "new" format is ... but APFS is optimized for SSDs and is not kind to performance on traditional HDDs ... and MacOS Extended Journaled will work just fine.

From the specs it seems like it would work, but I have no experience with that brand so I'm not able to comment on this particular enclosure. Perhaps someone else here will know about their reliability.

Regards.