Longtime WD customer… (~1996). I’ve installed a number of WD drives as upgrades over the years. Purchased a 500 Gb WD Blue NAND to replace a 1 Tb WD HDD as boot drive on a PC for my son. As some others on this forum, Acronis would launch, restart, then fail to clone. Believe this is related to going larger drive to small SSD, but original HDD has <100 Gb on it. Contacted Customer Support… what a hassle… after repeated emails, removing the installed drive to take a picture of its label, screen shots, event logs, etc… the best solution they could offer was a “work around” using an external disk. Not to mention the fact that Customer Support just up and abandoned me during the process. Took over 10 days to get NO solution. (Reference #: 200528-001754) Ridiculous! There are numerous 3rd party cloning software products that can handle this easily. WD should be ashamed of the shoddy software they provide and the horrible, slow, and unresponsive customer support. I’m returning the SSD today and will be hard pressed to make another WD purchase until I’ve given the competition a chance to disappoint me so thoroughly.
The same experience here … many failures and although not quite impossible, always a non-satisfying (100% good) cloning.
The only difference is that I haven’t tried any other cloning software.
After a few disappointments, I’ve always done a clean Windows installation.
That takes a little more time, but saves you a lot of frustrations.
I have used Macrium Reflect for a while and it has never disappointed me. However, I much prefer to do a Clean/Custom Windows install for a new drive. Always seems there’s some little problem when cloning.
I am in exactly the same position Grinch. I have already replaced the HDD in my laptop with a Samsung SSD and they provided their own software which cloned the drive perfectly.
After having to search all over the WD website, I finally found the WD cloning software - a version of Acronis 2016. Except it doesn’t work. So I’m now looking to either have to learn how to use Clonezilla or buy some cloning software, pushing my purchase price up (already tried my Samsung software and that will only work with Samsung drives).
So Samsung can provide free working software but WD can’t. And WD has not done anything about it. How can I say that? Well the software is from 2016 and I am not the first to have had this issue.
If I could I would send the drive back and buy samsung. Its more expensive but is equal to the WD SSD cost plus the cloning software I’m going to have to buy.
If it doesn’t work why have it on your site?
Very disappointed.
I never clone because I feel if you have issues with the current windows install, that you may not even be aware of, all you’re doing is duplicating them on the new drive. That’s just the way I do it and yeah I’m a nobody but it works for me. I do use Macrium to image my drive as a means of backup. As we all know Windows 2004 update had a ton of issues. I backed up prior to the update so I could easily roll back IF 2004 didn’t like my PC.
Macrium Reflect is FREE and it WORKS.
I think it would be a good plan for WD to drop Acronis and switch to Macrium!
