External Desktop Drives Western Digital

These drives are external, like the portable hard drives series, but are more difficult to carry – because they are bigger. So they are named desktop drives. But you can still use them as portable drives. There are five different sub-series: WD Elements Desktop, My Book Essential, My Book Elite, My Book Mirror Edition, and My Book 3.0.

WD Elements Desktop

These drives use USB 2.0 connectivity, and look like a big black box. The actual size is: height – 1.42 inches, length – 7.01 inches, and width – 4.59 inches. The weight is 2.24 pounds.

WD Elements Desktop drives are designed to save power. They turn on and off with the computer and when they are not used, they go into a mode that saves energy.

Capacities and models: 500GB (WDBAAU5000EBK), 640GB (WDBAAU6400EBK), 750GB (WDBAAU7500EBK), 1TB (WDBAAU0010HBK), 1.5TB (WDBAAU0015HBK), and 2TB (WDBAAU0020HBK).

My Book Essential

The My Book Essential external hard drives are with elegant book shaped design. They also have USB 2.0 connectivity, but are little more smart then the WD Elements Desktop drives.

Here we have password protection and hardware encryption, support for the technology WD SmartWare, and support for automatic backups.

Capacities and models: 500GB (WDBAAF5000EBK), 640GB (WDBAAF6400EBK), 750GB (WDBAAF7500EBK), 1TB (WDBAAF0010HBK), 1.5TB (WDBAAF0015HBK), and 2TB (WDBAAF0020HBK).

My Book Elite

The external drives Western Digital My Book Elite are pretty much a little more smart version of the My Book Essential drives. Here we have all their features, but plus the custom e-label. This is a display with useful information about our files in the drive.

Capacities and models: 640GB (WDBAAH6400ECH), 1TB (WDBAAH0010HCH), 1.5TB (WDBAAH0015HCH), and 2TB (WDBAAH0020HCH).

My Book Mirror Edition

As you can see from the picture, this thing is pretty big, and there is a reason why. There are actually two hard drives inside!

The My Book Mirror drives actually support RAID technology (Raid 1 and 0). This means that you can choose from two things: have twice the backup, or have twice the space. So in the first case your files are backed up in the two hard drives, and in the second case you use the two drives as one big one. Automatic backup is supported.

Capacities and models: 1TB (WDH2U10000), and 2TB (WDH2U20000).

My Book 3.0

It is ultra fast. It does not have any cool features, but it is very fast. The interface used is USB 3.0 instead of USB 2.0 and that makes the transfer speed much bigger. Of course you will need USB 3.0 port in order to take advantage of the high speed. It will work with older USB ports too, but slower.

Capacities and models: 1TB (WDBABP0010HCH), and 2TB (WDBABP0020HCH).