Do I need to format new drive?

I bought a WD10EZEX to replace the 500 GB drive in my Dell. When using the Acronis WD software, do I need to format the new drive or does the cloning process do that? I am new at cloning drives. Thank you.

generally speaking no, it’s not necessary

but you may run into big problem … searching this forum i found the WD10EZEX uses Advanced Format 4096 bytes per sector. (source link below)

if your 500 GB in the Dell is 512 bytes … then according to Acronis site, cloning is not possible if the sector sizes are different.

https://kb.acronis.com/content/56634

there is apparently 3rd party software however that can do it … Copying Drives with Different Block Sizes | The Easiest Way

Side Note:

I’m not a cloning expert but have used (Freeware) AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard to upgrade hard drives to larger ones using the Disk Copy Wizard and selecting “Copy System Files Only” ie. not selecting “Sector by Sector” copy.

I just put the new larger hard drive into a USB enclosure plugged it in … then did the Copy System Files over to it, once done, powered off the PC and removed and swapped hard drives and was up and running with a new larger hard drive with my Windows 7 and all programs and data intact.

Just to make it more confusing, I checked my wife’s Acer desktop and it has a WD10EZEX and msinfo32 says it has 512 sectors. maybe it was an older drive although the computer is only a couple of years old. Oh well,