The My Book drive is trusted desktop storage designed to complement your personal style with a massive amount of space to store your photos, videos, music and documents. Equipped with social media and cloud storage import, password protection and perfectly paired with WD Backup or Time Machine, My Book desktop storage helps keep your files safe. Auto backup with included WD Backup software and Time Machine compatibility.
WD Elements Desktop external hard drive offers reliable, instant, add-on storage up to 4TB capacity, rapid data transfer rates and universal connectivity.
Password protection with hardware encryption. Trusted storage built with WD reliability. USB 3.0 port; USB 2.0 compatible.
2-year manufacturer's limited warranty.
My Passport drives are designed to be portable. They use 2.5' (laptop) hard drives and are powered entirely through a USB connection so are very easy to carry around and use on the fly.My Book drives are designed for 'desktop' use (ie. Not being moved very often).
They use full sized 3.5' hard drives and usually require a mains power connection. You usually get better performance from desktop drives, but at the sacrifice of portability.Between these two drives there isn't going to be a huge difference since they both use 5400RPM hard drives. It really just depends on how you are using it - portable or not.
External drives are just internal drives with a box and an interface. The larger WD probably has a 3.5 in drive while the smaller of the two has a 2.5 in drive.
![Elements Elements](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125461658/868802493.jpg)
Differences are the same as with internals, one or both are probably 5200 RPM drives. I would expect that's the main difference. More 3.5s are 7200 than the smaller drives which are normally 5200, some lower than that.
Shouldn't have too much of an effect on performance though, which is to say, both will be adequate, neither blazing fast, but then, you probably don't need blazing fast transfer speeds.