Summary :

1. Best Hard Disk Clone Software Free
2. Best Hard Disk Clone Software

Select the Best Disk Cloning Software Based on this Review: Hard drive cloning software can make an effective copy of a hard drive. System administrators use cloning software to migrate data from one PC to another. Additionally, disk cloning apps make upgrading of hard drives and SSDs faster and easier. A hard disk cloning app can also be used. Clonezilla, the best disk imaging and cloning software that is not only free but opensource as well. However, it is a Linux (Debian or Ubuntu) based software thus you cannot install on Windows to use it like any other software listed in this list. Next best hard disk cloning software for Windows 10, 8, 7, MiniTool Partition Wizard Pro is an all-round disk management software that also features an option to clone hard disk Windows. With this hard drive management software, you can clone your hard disk, merge your hard disk partitions and extend your computer’s partitions as well. All you need is a cloning software that will create an exact copy of your old hard drive to the new disk. But that in itself is a problem because there are too many software that claim to do this. Therefore, in this post, I am going to recommend 5 software that you can use to not only clone your disk but also perform disk imaging backups. Acronis Disk Director is one of the best disk cloning software which can help you clone your hard disk, protect & manage your data, and hard disk. This cloning software can swiftly create partitions, resize, merge, move them without the fear of data loss. Features Of Acronis Disk Director.

What is the best WD clone software? MiniTool Partition Wizard offers most flexible way to clone western digital hard drive as well as clone operating system from WD hard drive. Get the partition magic now!

I just wanted to know what the best software for cloning an hdd is. Either free or not I'm willing to get any. I tried to search the net but there are too many to choose from, so I want your suggestions if any of you guys are using cloning software.--from Tomsguide

Why Clone WD Hard Drive?

As we all know, WD hard drives enjoy a high reputation around the world. Numerous of users are using WD hard drives as their storage devices, and many users want to upgrade their hard drives to WD hard drives (navigate to About Western Digital to know more about WD hard drives). In fact, no matter you are working with WD hard drive or you want to upgrade to WD drive, you may need WD cloning software in the following cases:

1. Hard drive backup. Data safety is always the first concern when we use computer. And one of the most effective ways we can select is to clone WD hard drive as a full backup. This way is very useful when you need to use the backup copy immediately, avoiding the complex steps of restoring compared with disk image backup.
2. Hard drive upgrade. This can be divided into 3 aspects: the hard drive capacity is too small, the hard drive is outdated, and the hard drive is going to fail. To be specific, we tend to store all kinds of data on our hard drives; hence the hard drive is easy to run out of disk space if we are employing a small drive. With the rapid development of hard drive field, the new released hard drives offer incomparable performances. To enjoy the new technology, we need to upgrade our hard drive by cloning. And, if one of our hard drives is going to fail, we need to clone hard drive to prevent data loss in time.
3. Multiple installations. For computer systems administrators, installing and maintaining an organization's computers are important. Usually, computers in one organization have the same configurations, and cloning hard drive from a ready computer can save administrators a lot of time in installing OS and necessary applications repeatedly when they have got a lot of bare computers to deal with.

Knowing the reasons that lead us to clone WD hard drive, here we recommended 2 pieces of Western Digital cloning software to help us clone WD hard drive easily, quickly, and safely.

The Best Free WD Cloning Software

Although there is a lot of disk cloning software we can get online, the one that offers top performance at the lowest price is always the best choice. And the following 2 pieces of free Western Digital cloning software do meet this requirement.

Want to know the best part? Just keep reading.

1. MiniTool Partition Wizard

MiniTool Partition Wizard is an all-in-one disk partition manager that can keep your hard drive being used in the best condition. For instance, it can fix some issues like 'low disk space warning', 'virtual disk service error', 'Windows was unable to complete the format', convert FAT to NTFS, and more… After years of development, MiniTool Partition Wizard has been upgraded to V10.2, with more useful features and more stable performance.

As one of the best cloning software 2017, it offers the best feature to clone WD hard drive, which is called Copy Disk. Copy Disk employs sector-by-sector copy method; hence you don't need to worry about the boot issue after the cloning. How can we actually use it? First of all, download this freeware from the official site and install it on computer. Then, follow the detailed guidance below.

Before you do:
Prepare a hard drive that is ready for cloning WD hard drive and connect it to your PC normally. If there are important files on the drive, transfer them to another location beforehand. Then launch MiniTool Partition Wizard to its main interface.

Step 1. Select the source disk and choose Copy Disk feature.

Launch MiniTool Partition Wizard to its main interface. On the main interface, click the disk icon of the source disk, and then choose Copy Disk from the action panel on the left side.

Step 2. Select target disk.

In the pop-up window, select the disk you have just connected as the target disk. Then click Next to continue. Please note that the target disk should be a basic disk and all data on it will be destroyed.

Step 3. Review changes.

Here you can have a preview of what is going to happen on your target disk. However, you can also change some copy options according to your own needs before you click Next.

• Fit partitions to entire disk: fulfill all disk space on the target disk according to partition size ratio.
• Copy partitions without resize: keep the original partition sizes. Only available when the target disk is not smaller than the source disk.
• Align partitions to 1MB: improve the performance of the target disk if it is an SSD or advanced format disk (*appears only when you are cloning an MBR disk).
• Use GUID Partition Table: turn the target disk into GPT disk which is helpful when the target disk is larger than 2TB (*appears only when you are cloning an MBR disk and requires payment if you are cloning the system disk).

Step 4. Read notice.

Now you will receive a message telling how to boot from the target disk. If you are cloning system disk, keep this in mind and click Finish. Photoshop keyboard shortcuts mac download.

Step 5. Confirm the cloning.

At last, click Apply button at the top left corner to start cloning WD hard drive. If you are cloning the system disk, MiniTool Partition Wizard needs a reboot to finish his job.

More You Need to Know about MiniTool Partition Wizard

Now you know how to use MiniTool Partition Wizard as WD cloning software. If you think this is the only reason to choose MiniTool Partition Wizard, probably you are wrong. Here is more information you need to know about MiniTool Partition Wizard:

Copy Disk not only helps to copy basic disks (both system and non-system disk) but also helps to copy dynamic disks (non-system disk). In addition, you can choose to copy from MBR to MBR, from GPT to GPT, and from MBR to GPT.

How to clone MBR to GPT? If you need to clone MBR to GPT disk, MiniTool Partition Wizard is the best choice.

From the menu bar, you can find another feature called Migrate OS to SSD/HD, which offers two ways to migrate OS. The first way is to copy the system required partitions only, and the second way is to copy the whole system disk (same with Copy Disk). There is one point you need to pay attention to: Migrate OS to SSD/HD only works with the currently running OS. If you want to clone another system to WD hard drive, you should first of all boot computer from that system to do the cloning.

2. MiniTool ShadowMaker

MiniTool ShadowMaker is the second recommendation for WD cloning software, which is also free for users to use at present. In fact, MiniTool ShadowMaker can be regarded as WD backup software as well as WD cloning software. Why? Although it is a professional system backup software that is quite helpful in Windows backup, it offers Clone Disk feature under Tools to help users carry out hard disk clone. So you can download this free backup software as Western Digital cloning software.

Let's take a close look at how MiniTool ShadowMaker performs on hard drive clone.

Before you do: Connect a hard drive to your computer for hard drive clone. Make sure it can be formatted because the cloning process will format all parititons on it. Otherwise, transfer important files to a safe location in advance.

Step 1. Choose a computer to manage.

After installing and launching Minitool ShadowMaker, you will be asked to choose a computer to manage. Usually, we choose This Computer unless we are doing remote control.

Step 2. Find Clone Disk function under Tools.

When you see the main interface, navigate to Tools and select Clone Disk function.

Step 3. Select source disk and target disk.

Click the two disk icons to select the source disk and the target disk. Please note that data on the target disk will be destroyed, so it is also very important to have a backup of the data on the target drive. Then click Yes to confirm the clone.

Step 4. Wait until the copy process is finished.

After your confirmation, MiniTool ShadowMaker will start the cloning process. Please wait patiently until it finishes.

When it has finished the cloning, it will give you the following message (image attached). This means that you get two exact same drives. So you had better disconnect one in case that any mistake can happen. If both hard drives are connected to your PC, one of them will be marked as Offline by Windows. Our suggestion is to shut down PC and disconnect the drive you don't need.

Download tear her clothes for android. This post offers the best free Windows 10 image backup software to back up Windows 10 OS with ease to a USB drive, external drive, NAS, etc.

About Western Digital

Western Digital Corporation is commonly referred to as Western Digital and is often abbreviated as WDC or WD. Western Digital is an American computer data storage company and one of the largest computer hard disk drive manufacturers in the world, along with Seagate Technology.

Hard Drives of WD

By now Western Digital has produced a series of hard drives, and these drive names are based on colors that signify the characteristics of the drive:

• Green drives (have been discontinued) were energy efficient, with slightly slower performance.
• Blue drives offer average performance and are most suitable for home use.
• Black drives are cost-effective and offer high performance.
• Red drives are designed for 7*24 NAS use, with great compatibility.
• Purple drives are designed for 7*24 surveillance data storage.
• Gold drives are designed for datacenter use.

Advantages of WD Hard Drives

Remember what we say at the beginning? 'Numerous of users are using WD hard drives as their storage devices, and many users want to upgrade their hard drives to WD hard drives.' Why do we say this? According to users' feedback, WD hard drives can keep years of good working, with lower temperature and lower noise. Besides, it is not so expensive compared with other manufactures'. In a word, WD hard drives bring high price-performance ratio to users. In this aspect, hard drive cloning software is useful for WD cloning.

Summary

Here comes to the end of this post. Reading here, I guess you know how to use the best free WD cloning software to clone hard drives when there is a necessity. Hope the two programs are helpful to you. If you have any questions or suggestions on how to use MiniTool software to clone WD hard drive, let us know by typing your questions in the comment section below. Or you can contact us via [email protected]. All ideas are welcome.

Summary :

What is the best free drive copy software? MiniTool Partition Wizard is the best hard drive cloning software which can be used to clone hard drive easily and safely. Download the free cloning software now and have a try!

Why Clone Hard Drive?

Disk cloning is very useful in hard drive management. Simply put, disk cloning copies the complete contents of a hard drive, including the files, the partition tables and the MBR to another location.

It is worth mentioning that when you clone a hard drive, both the source disk and the target disk can be used directly, which is regarded as a simple, direct duplicate (however, cloning is different from copy & paste, check Clone VS. Copy & Paste for the detail).

In the following situations, you may consider hard drive cloning:

• To upgrade to larger hard drivewhen the current hard drive is too small and cannot meet your data storage requirements any longer. For example, you meet the 'low disk space' issue but all partitions are almost full.
• To upgrade hard drive to more advanced SSD to enjoy smooth computer performance. This is extremely useful for those who want to upgrade system disk, as SSD offers faster read-write speed.
• You have a batch of computers (with the same configuration) to be installed. To avoid installing all computers one by one, you can install only one at first and then turn to hard drive cloning software to save effort and time.
• To make an exact hard drive backup. Through free disk cloning, you get a copy of disk backup and avoid the trouble of data restoration when the backup copy is needed.

So the conclusion here is that if you are upgrading your hard drive to a larger one, or replacing it due to a physical failure, cloning hard drive is the easiest method to complete that task. Besides, doing hard drive copy reduces the risk of any accidental data loss.

Recommended Hard Drive Copy Utility

Since hard drive copy is significant, you must be wondering: which is the best freeware for drive copy? In my opinion, MiniTool Partition Wizard is the top recommendation. I will give you my explanation.

Developed by MiniTool Software Ltd., MiniTool Partition Wizard is regarded as the best drive copy software for Windows users, including those who are running 32/64 bits Windows 10, Windows 8, and Windows7.

As free drive cloning software, MiniTool Partition Wizard offers two ways to clone hard drives for hard drive upgrade or data backup, including 'Copy Disk' and 'Migrate OS to SSD/HD' (if you only want to clone the system).

All you have to do is put the new drive in the computer as a slave or secondary drive and use this disk copy software to clone the old drive to the new one. Once the process is complete, switch the new drive to the primary and then you are good to go (for hard drive upgrade).

Just press the button to have this free drive cloning tool downloaded! The free edition is flexible to copy any non-system disk; while to copy your system disk, you will need to upgrade to a more advanced edition.

Knowing what MiniTool Partition Wizard is, let's have a look on how to clone a hard drive by using MiniTool Partition Wizard. Here we just take clone hard drive Windows 10 for example, and MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition should be the right choice.

1. To use 'Copy Disk Wizard', both the source disk and target disk must be basic disks.
2. The target disk will be cleaned during the cloning process. Please make sure it can be cleaned; otherwise transfer data out at first.

Step 1. Run MiniTool Partition Wizard to the main interface, then you can see all your hard drives connected to this PC are shown in the middle panel and some operable features are listed in the left panel. Now, select Copy Disk feature to clone hard drive.

Step 2. Here you need to select the target disk (must be basic disk) and click Next to continue. Make sure you know which drive you are cloning to so you do not overwrite the wrong drive.

Step 3. Here come the copy options. If you are copying from a GPT disk, you are able to see 2 options. (4 options when you are cloning an MBR disk, see details here.)

• Fit partitions to entire disk: all partitions will be cloned to the target disk and take up its full capacity according to the partition size proportion.
• Copy partitions without resize: all partitions will be cloned to the target disk according to the original partition size. This option is available when the target disk is large enough to hold all partitions on the source disk.

After you have made the copy options, you can customize each partition size according to your own preference. Then click Next to go on.

Step 4. Then you can see a note which reads 'To boot from the new disk, please configure computer BIOS settings. Make sure the new disk is configured as the default boot disk.' Please keep this in mind if you are cloning the system disk before you click Finish.

Step 5. Finally, you need to press the Apply button located on the toolbar to start hard drive cloning process. When finished, you will find all your files stay intact on the original drive and the target drive has an exact same copy.

For a more intuitive guidance, please watch this video:

Don't hesitate to have a try on this free cloning software now!

RECOMMEND:

Want to know more information about how to successfully boot computer from the new hard drive? Now, you can find answers from our previous post: 2 Ways to Boot from New Hard Drive after Copying Disk or Migrating OS.

Best Hard Disk Clone Software Free

In fact, MiniTool also puts forward another free cloning software to clone hard drives which is called MiniTool ShadowMaker. Although it is mainly designed for Windows backup, it also comes with useful Clone Disk feature. To get the details of how to use this disk copy software, you are suggested to read Clone OS from HDD to SSD.

Tips for Cloning Your Hard Drive

Now you know how to clone hard drive by using MiniTool free cloning software. Here I would like to put forward some tips to help you deal with cloning issue better.

• Don't just copy & paste files to another location on your hard disk if you are leading the operating system. Use professional disk cloning software like MiniTool Partition Wizard to help you.
• Use another hard drive, especially an external hard drive for your backup copies, because there is less chance of losing/damaging computer and external hard drive at the same time.
• At least one cloning copy should be kept well. Don't erase the current backup unless you are going to create a new one.
• If you use your computer frequently, back up your data often. Having a recent backup is always good for data recovery. Apart from hard drive clone, professional disk imaging software is also recommended to save effort.

Further Reading: Cloning VS. Imaging

When dealing with backup issue, cloning or imaging is always the question asked by many users. Many people choose to make a disk image, while many prefer hard drive cloning. Before I state my opinion, I would like to start with cloning VS. imaging.

One may ask, 'what the heck is the difference between cloning and imaging?'

Imaging is frequently used for preventative backup, which means you never know when you need the backup image for data restoration. Today most disk imaging software offer schedule backup feature, and you can set to back up files daily, weekly, or monthly. Besides, incremental backup and differential backup are provided, making it possible to save hard disk space.

If something bad happens, you can have the original image for restoration purposes without having to reinstall Windows and other applications.

Disk cloning is more significant for hard drive replacement or hard drive upgrading, which means probably you will use the destination disk right away. When you clone a hard drive, actually you are cloning the entire contents of the drive instead of creating an image file.

The only issue you need to concern is that you need to have another physical hard drive that is large enough to contain all data in the original drive. During the cloning process, all files on the target disk will be cleaned so be sure that you are operating the right disk.

The conclusion here is: although cloning and imaging both back up and restore data, whether to choose cloning or imaging all depends on what you want to accomplish. In a word, for frequent backup issue, imaging software is better; for hard drive upgrading issue, free hard drive cloning software should be given the priority.

Summary

In this post, I mainly tell why you need to clone hard drive, which tool is best for hard drive clone, how to use it to clone hard drive, the differences between cloning and imaging, and several tips on hard drive cloning. Hope all these information is helpful in dealing with your hard drive copy issues.

Best Hard Disk Clone Software

Now it's your turn to have a try. Just download the best free drive copy software and start cloning hard drive. I believe you can do everything smoothly as long as you follow this guide correctly. For any suggestions or questions towards using MiniTool software, please contact [email protected] or leave us comments below. Much appreciated!