Best Western Digital SSD Migration Tool to Clone OS or Disk [Guide]

Choose the Right SSD for Data Migration

It's necessary to choose the right SSD that can be compatible with your computer. Otherwise, you can't boot from the cloned SSD. Here are two key points in the following:

1. Check Computer Hardware Support

Before purchasing an SSD, check with your hardware manufacturer's user manual and specifications to determine the disk type and how many slots are available. Most newer computers support both 2.5" SATA and M.2 slots.

2. Know Your Specific Need

• WD Green: Ideal for everyday light computing tasks, suitable for students and casual home users
• WD Blue: Ideal for everyday larger computing tasks, suitable for desktop, laptop, and all-in-one computers
• WD Red: Uniquely engineered for use in Network Attached Storage (NAS), useful for small home offices to medium sized businesses
• WD_BLACK: Offers superior performance and experience, suitable for high performance needs and gaming
• WD Gold: Reliable, performance drives for enterprise applications, designed for use in small business data hubs and corporate storage

Does Western Digital SSD Come with Cloning Software?

Nowadays, many SSD drives come with cloning software, like Samsung Data Migration, Seagate DiscWizard, Intel® Data Migration Software, NTI Echo cloning software, etc., thus many users may wonder if Western Digital SSD has cloning software. 

As a matter of fact, Western Digital (WD) does not come with cloning software, and requires you to download the WD SSD clone software from the WD site. Also, you can choose to use an excellent third-party software to clone hard drive to WD SSD. 

Which Software Should You Use?

Here are two official Western Digital SSD migration tools, e.g., WD Backup, and Acronis True Image for WD Edition. However, you may receive the following errors while backing up or cloning data:

• WD Backup not working while backing up sometimes, or WD Backup stuck at 0, or even misses the backup task

• Acronis True Image WD Edition clone not working
• 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 (if you don't have at least one WD hard drive)
• ...

Thus, they are not a good choice for the Western Digital SSD migration tool.

We strongly recommend using professional disk cloning software - AOMEI Backupper Professional. It's said to be the best alternative to the Acronis True Image WD edition. With it, you can backup and clone the entire disk or migrate OS to WD SSD in all Windows systems. If it's a system disk, the cloned SSD will remain bootable.

In addition, you can also use it with other SSD brands, such as cloning hard drive to Samsung 980 Pro, Crucial P5 Plus, Seagate Firecuda 530, Sabrent Rocket, SK Hynix Gold P31, etc.

How to Perform Western Digital SSD Migration Safely (2 Methods)

From above, it's not difficult to see that AOMEI Backupper is the best Western Digital SSD migration tool for SSD migration. It provides you with 2 ways, namely using "System Clone", "Disk Clone".

The previous is to migrate OS only to WD SSD, while the latter is to transfer the entire hard drive. For the system disk, you don't need to reinstall Windows, installed programs, and settings, etc. Also, you can enjoy the following advantages during the process:

AOMEI Backupper

Professional Western Digital SSD Cloning Software 

• GUI interface - With a clear and user-friendly interface, all users can get started easily and quickly.

• 2 cloning methods - Clone only the used sectors of a drive with intelligent clone (default), especially for cloning larger HDD to smaller SSD, or clone all sectors with sector by sector clone. 

• SSD Alignment - Improve the read and write speeds of SSD disks and prolong their lifespan.

• Multi-brand support - Work well to clone any WD SSDs, including WD Green SSD, WD Blue SSD, etc., as well as SanDisk drives, Samsung drives, Mushkin SSDs, etc.

• OS supported - Windows Vista, 7, 8/8.1,10 and 11 (all editions, 32-bit and 64-bit). For server users, try the Server edition and Technician Plus edition (unlimited PCs and servers).

Free Download
Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7

100% Secure

Way 1. Clone OS to Western Digital SSD with Secure Boot

This method migrates OS only, including the operating system, system files, installed programs, and your data on the system partition, usually the C: drive. 

Step 1. Launch the best Western Digital SSD clone software - AOMEI Backupper Professional. Select Clone -> System Clone on the left side panel. 

Step 2. In the following window, choose the Western Digital SSD as the target location. 

Step 3. Tick the SSD Alignment option to optimize the WD SSD disk performance, and afterward click Start Clone to do Western Digital data migration.

After a while, you will migrate OS to a Western Digital SSD successfully. Naturally, how long it takes depends on the data size of your system partitions.

Once it’s complete, enter into BIOS and set SSD as the first boot disk. If you're migrating Windows 10/11 from MBR HDD to GPT SSD, you may want to know how to change boot mode from Legacy to UEFI.

Way 2. Bootable Clone HDD to Western Digital (WD) SSD (For Entire Disk)

This method helps to transfer everything from HDD to Western Digital SSD with the best Western Digital SSD clone software - AOMEI Backupper Professional.

Step 1. Click Disk Clone under the Clone tab on the main window. Or choose Partition Clone if you want to clone an individual partition.

Step 2. Select your current Windows 10/11 HDD as the source disk, and click Next >>.

Step 3. Tap to select the Western Digital (WD) SSD as the destination disk, and press Next >>.

Step 4. Tick SSD Alignment and press Start Clone >> to clone HDD to Western Digital SSD easily in Windows 10/11.

By default, this WD cloning software will clone used sectors and skip bad sectors, thus you will have more disk space. But some users report that the cloned hard drive shows wrong size, for example, 1TB hard drive only shows 500 GB. This is because another 500GB is marked as unallocated space. 

At this moment, you can choose to enable the premium feature - Edit Partitions and use Add unused space to all partitions or Manually adjust partition size to fully use the storage space on the Western Digital SSD.

If you are cloning between different partition styles (MBR to GPT or GPT to MBR),  it's suggested to convert the destination disk from MBR (GPT) to GPT (MBR). Thus, you don't need to change boot mode to boot from the cloned disk. 

MBR and GPT are two different disk types for data storage. You can check the disk properties in Disk Management. The overall steps are below:

• Press Win + R to open the Run window. Then, type diskmgmt.msc and hit OK to open disk management.
• Then, right-click the disk you want to clone and select Properties in the pop-up window.
• In the Properties window, select the Volume tab and confirm the partition style. It can be MBR (Master Boot Record) or GPT (GUID Partition Table).

• Similarly, check the disk partition style of the destination disk.

Definitely, you could clone larger disk to smaller disk as long as the smaller disk could hold all the data from the source disk.

Conclusion

As you can see, AOMEI Backupper is a powerful Western Digital SSD migration tool that can help you migrate the Windows operating system (OS) to a WD SSD, and clone HDD to WD SSD effortlessly in Windows 10/11 or previous systems. By default, it uses Intelligent Clone to clone only used sectors. So you can easily and safely clone large HDD to smaller SSD.

Besides, it applies to clone all kinds of HDDs and SSDs, such as migrate OS from MBR HDD to GPT SSD, clone HDD to Samsung SSD, clone SATA SSD to NVMe SSD, clone PCIe SSD, clone NVMe to larger NVMe, etc.