There are a lot of extraordinary programs that can back up your files, but at times you really want something somewhat more unbeatable. Perhaps you’re moving your Windows installation to another drive, or maybe you need a one-to-one duplicate on the off chance that anything turns out badly. In those cases, your smartest option is to clone your hard drive, making a precise duplicate you can swap in and boot up immediately.
Moreover, if you want to upgrade to a larger capacity drive, hard drive cloning allows you to transfer all the data and settings from the old drive to the new one, ensuring a seamless transition without reinstalling everything from scratch.
How to clone a hard drive? You typically need specialized cloning software.
How To Choose The Best Disk Clone Software
There are numerous third-party applications available, both free and paid, that offer hard drive cloning functionality. How to choose a full-featured, easy-to-operate and reliable clone tool? Please refer to the following standards:
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Support Various Disk Types
There are various kinds of hard drives with various storage capacities, cost ranges, form factors and interface types. It is likely that you are cloning between different disk types, such as clone hard drive to SSD, clone SATA SSD to M.2 SSD, etc. A potent clone program should allow you to transfer data between different disk types smoothly.
What’s more, when you are cloning MBR disk to GPT disk or GPT disk to MBR disk, a tool that can carry out disk clone without asking you to convert the partition style first will save you plenty of effort.
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Clone Between Different Sizes
Many users clone smaller drives to larger drives to get more storage space. If you don’t resize partitions on the destination drive after cloning, there will be unallocated space left that can’t be utilized to store information. Thus, you need a clone tool that allows you to edit partitions during the cloning process.
Additionally, some users copy a larger drive to a smaller drive. For this situation, such hard drive cloning software that can clone just utilized areas on the source drive is required.
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Built-in SSD Alignment Feature
When upgrading a hard drive, SSD is a popular option. The fact that SSDs use 4K alignment, which significantly reduces reading and writing times, is one of the distinctions between HDDs and SSDs. A sort of disk cloning software that can make the SSD 4K-aligned in the cloning process is vital.
After comparing several commonly used clone software on the market, I find AOMEI Backupper Professional meets all of the aforementioned requirements. How to use it for hard drive cloning? Please move on to the next part.
How To Transfer Os And Data From HDD to SSD
Let’s say you want to replace HDD with Crucial SSD. In the first place, connect the Crucial SSD to your PC. You can connect it internally through a drive bay or externally through a SATA-to-USB adapter. Also, backup your files on the SSD if it is not empty. Then adhere to the guidance below:
Step 1.
On your PC, download, install, and run this specialized disk clone software. After that, select Clone > Disk Clone.
Step 2.
Select the old hard drive on your PC from the Source Disk page. Then click Next.
Step 3.
Select the SSD just connected from the Destination Disk page and click Next.
Step 4.
It is recommended that you check the SSD Alignment option in order to improve the SSD’s read and write speeds. Click Start Clone at the end to begin copying the HDD to the Crucial SSD.
After cloning, you can boot from the cloned SSD by changing the boot order in the BIOS. If you’re cloning a system disk from MBR to GPT or GPT to MBR, you should also change the boot mode if you want your computer to start up.
Assuming you are searching for Windows backup solutions, you can attempt the best free backup software – AOMEI Backupper Standard. Depending on your needs, it can be used to backup your system, disks, partitions, or files. With a backup close by, you will not need to stress over losing data in the future!