By Teresa / Last update June 2, 2023

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About Western Digital Drives

Western Digital (WD) is one of the largest hard drive manufacturers around the world, and their internal and external disks are widely used on many popular name brands of computers such as HP, Acer and so on, both laptop and PC. 

Some types of Western Digital hard drives are quite popular among users, for instances, WD Blue 4TB drives are famous for best capacity, and WB Black 6TB drives are known as best speed. Also, if you're looking for the best budget, the WD Blue 1TB drives might be your best choice.

Thus, hot words, for example, Western Digital clone, are often discussed by different kinds of users. Also, many users will discuss some very popular questions and hope for clear answers, such as, Does WD SSD come with cloning software? What is the best free cloning software? How do I clone a WD hard drive? You can get them in the following.

WD Blue

 

Does Western Digital Have Cloning Software? 

WD SSD does not come along with Western Digital cloning software, but you can download them from their official website.

  • To clone WD hard drive, you could consider using WD Backup or Acronis True Image WD Edition software.
  • To improve performance of your WD hard drive or SSD, you could use WD Align Windows or Western Digital Dashboard.

Before you start to use them, there are some limitations you need to know.

First, WD cloning software requires a WD hard drive, or the process will fail, throwing you an error message like "Acronis True Image WD Edition installation restricted - This product edition requires at least one Western Digital or SanDisk drive to be installed in your system".

Second, even if you connect one WD hard drive or SSD to your computer, you may still encounter WD Backup not working issue or the Acronis True Image will not clone from the selected disk as per your needs. 

Except for the cloning software, WD Align Windows or Western Digital Dashboard still has limitations. For example, both software only support WD hard drive or SSD.

In addition, the WD Align Windows requires a bootable WD Align CD to perform the align process, but this old medium is no longer widely used in digital life. To complete the entire process, you need to use two types of software coming from the download file, WD Align and WD Align Media Builder.

Best Western Digital Cloning Software in Windows

Cloning disk means copying everything on one disk including the operating system, configuration settings, applications, and personal data to another hard drive you desire.

You may need to clone hard drive when you want to upgrade the old disk to a new one, replace the small hard drive with a larger one, transfer the drive to a smaller one, or make a duplication of your hard drive for the emergent environment.

What the motivation is matters less. What matters most is to choose the best Western Digital clone software for SSD to achieve the goal and get peace in mind.

Fortunately, you can try all-in-one disk cloning software - AOMEI Backupper Professional. It provides powerful features for you.

✪ You can not only clone disk but also clone partition/volume, even without booting into Windows.
✪ It runs intelligent clone by default to help you clone larger drive to smaller drive as long as the smaller drive could store all the data from the larger disk.
✪ It uses 4K partition alignment technology to improve the performance of SSD disk.
✪ You can create a bootable USB to start your computer when it's unbootable.
✪ This WD cloning software supports latest Windows 11 and supports nearly all SSDs, including WD SSD, Samsung SSD, HP SSD, Acer SSD, etc.

Feel free to download AOMEI Backupper on your PC. Have a try with the Clone demo part.

Download Demo Win 11/10/8.1/8/7/XP
Secure Download

How to Perform WD Drive Clone in Windows 7/8/10/11

Preparations:

  • The target hard drive should be connected to your PC properly. Normally the WD SSD clone software AOMEI Backupper could recognize the new disk, yet in some cases when the disk is not detected correctly, it is highly suggested to initialize the new WD drive to MBR or GPT in Disk Management.

  • The destination hard drive will be overwritten, so backup important files if you don’t want to lose them.

Step-by-step guide of WD clone HDD to SSD

1. Install and launch the WD cloning software - AOMEI Backupper. Select Disk Clone in the Clone tab.

Disk Clone

2. Select the Western Digital hard drive (HDD) as Source Disk.

Source Disk

3. Select the larger SSD as Destination Disk.

Destination Disk

4. Check the SSD Alignment option to optimize the SSD’s reading and writing speed and its lifespan, and then click Start Clone to confirm Western Digital hard drive clone.

Start Clone

✍ Helpful Tips:

1. This WD clone software only clones the used space (the used sectors) by default. If you want to clone unused space, check Sector by sector clone to clone all sectors from the source disk.

2. If you are cloning smaller disk to larger disk, it’s highly recommended to use Edit Partitions option to fully use the storage space on your destination disk.

  • Copy without resizing partitions (Do not do any changes).

  • Add unused space to all partitions (The cloned partitions will be automatically re-sized to fit the entire destination disk, according to the disk size).

  • Manually adjust partition size (Manually adjust the partition size and location by dragging a slider bar).

3. AOMEI Backupper also supports cloning MBR to GPT disk, GPT to MBR disk or  GPT to GPT disk with OS installed.

4. AOMEI Backupper is more than WD disk cloning software. It also contains backup & restore features. You are allowed to create disk image for your hard drive and compress the image file based on your need.

How to Make the Cloned System Disk Boot Successfully

If you just cloned the system disk, you have two methods to ensure secure boot.

1. Shut down your machine, disconnect the current hard drive using screwdrivers and keep only the cloned SSD connected and then boot from the cloned SSD.

2. Reboot your PC, and repeatedly press a certain key (F2, F10, F12, DEL, or ESC, etc. Depending on your manufacturer) to enter into BIOS. Then change the boot priority to boot from the cloned SSD.

Boot Order SSD

WD Disk Cloning Software FAQs

1. Does WD Black come with cloning software?

No. WD Black doesn’t have cloning software. If you want to clone WD Black SSD, try reliable third-party cloning programs.

2. Is WD disk cloning software free?

That depends. If you download Acronis True Image for Western Digital from WD website, it offers a 5-year license to use the software with your compatible drive. If you choose AOMEI Backupper, it has free version to clone a WD data disk and paid version to clone a WD system disk.

Verdict

The powerful WD disk cloning software - AOMEI Backupper allows you to clone WD HDD/SSD in only four steps. Apart from disk clone, you could also do other operations with this useful utility.

For instance, you can create Windows 7/8/10/11/XP/Vista system backup or Windows boot disk backup. Meantime, you can do automatic/schedule backup, block level incremental backup, and file sync, etc.

If you want to protect unlimited computers within your company, you can pick AOMEI Backupper Technician. With the inbuilt AOMEI Image Deploy tool, you are also allowed to deploy system image file on server-side computer to multiple client-side computers over network.