How To Clone A Hard Drive To SSD

You may have a desire to clone hard drive to SSD, but why would you desire to clone your hard drive to a larger disk? No need to worry about, we will discuss here its major purposes;

• For better performance:

If you select to clone a hard drive with SSD or any other drive having a wider capacity, then you will face majority of further issues in the coming days. This is because as you collect more and more data files in the hard drive of your computer, this will start to slow down while working on different tasks. To solve this problem, we will highly recommend you to clone your hard drive with a faster solid state drive. SSD behaves as much faster, quieter, use less power, lighter, and pretty durable as compared to an old traditional HDD.

Currently, SSDs are affordable:

In the previous decades, as you purchased a solid state drive you would require to understand whether the advantages out weighted the high cost or not. But nowadays, because of improvements in the production techniques as well as an increase in availability, the cost of SSD has down in a sharp manner. Many options are available like M.2 SSD, mSATA, and PCI-Express along with regular SSDs of SATA. An important popular Solid State Drive such as WD Blue, Mushkin Reactor, Samsung M.2, PNY SSDs, and Samsung 970 EVO are available in the market on the famous sites of internet.

Why do you require a hard drive cloning?

For the purpose of cloning HDD to SSD, you will require the below things;

1. Ready an old traditional hard drive which has a feature of OS installation, analyze the wrong sectors as well as fix them. With an OS installed, you can only boot your PC with the help of a disk. In case of deleted or destructive operating system, a user could not be able to boot the laptop without a proper bootable USB. If the cloned Solid State Drive consists of wrong sectors regarding to real hard drive, the SSD of cloned type may would not boot.
2. For the shifting of OS, get a new Solid State Drive. After the cloning of working system from the hard drive to Solid State Drive, you would be able to boot from the new SSD. This is right in case when the SSD has not initiated.
3. To ensure that you would not lose any kind of personal data, develop a backup for the disc. In case of some unexpected happenings during the transfer method, this backup will help you to restore the laptop within its previous state.   
4. Now you disconnect the whole types of external peripheral systems such as external displays, printers, and storage device to make sure you shift the data files from HDD to SSD in a right way.
5. Then free the disk cloning software. Commonly, a better disk cloning software is an important thing you require. In case of right software usage, the whole procedure would be feasible and straightforward. We suggest you to practice the AOMEI Backupper Standard, because this is so easy in use along with free of cost.
6. Use the adapter of USB to SATA. Connect the superfast new SSD with your computer that has only one hard drive bay as well.

AOMEI Backupper Standard: Free hard drive cloning software

The edition of AOMEI Backupper Standard is able to perform the process of cloning HDD to Solid State Drive. This even perform the cloning process of greater size hard drive to smaller size Solid State Drive with the help of just few clicks. During the cloning process, SSD have different types of structures to Hard Drive so that partition will require to be arranged with respect to the boundaries of Solid State Drive block. The AOMEI Backupper may also include the SSD Alignment option. After the completion of cloning process, you will not worry about SSD alignments along with SSD speed. Due to the greater technology of volume shadow copy service, a user would not worry about cloning method that will interrupt functions. This AOMEI Backupper will help to check the space of destination disk whether this is enough for the cloning of HDD or not. AOMEI Backupper also guides about transfer of data to the storage device with the help of partition clone.

Cloning of HDD to SDD

You can effortlessly clone your HDD, the disk of system or data disk to an SSD with the help of software of windows backup i.e. EaseUS Todo Backup. Before starting the cloning process, there are some essential preparations required for smooth process.

1. Make sure to back up the existing files of SSD before the action of disk clone. Because the cloning process of hard drive to SSD will delete the whole data from the target system.
2. After cloning of HDD to SSD, make sure the SSD capacity increases the used memory on the system HDD as well as there will boot the problems.
3. Notice that the partition design of the target disc must be in accordance with source disc of system. In case of no availability, you will require to move from MBR to GPT.

To analyze the partition style of SSD and HDD following steps are required;

• STEP 1: Connect the SSD/HDD to the PC system.
• STEP 2: Right-click on ‘This PC’, and select the ‘Manage’ > ‘Disc Management’.
• STEP 3: Right-click ‘disc’, and select the ‘properties’.
• STEP 4: Switch to the tab of ‘volumes’. Now you can observe the partition style of the disk, below the disk information.

Complete the whole requirements given above, you can clone HDD to SSD by applying given rules;

• STEP 1: First of all launch the EaseUS Todo Backup in your PC, and then click on ‘clone’.
• STEP 2: Choose a source disk that consists of your operating system.
• STEP 3: Now, select the destination disc.

Some Advance Options: In some special cases, these advance options will help you to clone HDD to SSD in smooth and stable way. Moreover, beyond these setting advance options, the Todo backup can still provide an intact and direct clone.

Optimization of SSD:

Checking this option that will ensure the sector alignment in this process, if the destination disc is Solid State Drive.

Clone sector by sector: This clone of the sector by sector will ensure the destination of hard disk in the same way just as the partition source. If the option is analyzed, this will clone the whole sectors, even the sector is empty. Thus, after the process, a target will be exactly equal in size to the disk that is being cloned. When you select the destination partition/HDD in both partition clone wizard and disk clone, this option is available in the same step. 

Develop a portable USB drive:

The portable windows USB drive ensure that the cloned USB disk is able to boot simply.

STEP 4: Now preview the changes and save them. The software will start to clone your whole system as well. You may observe that there is an option for the system clone within the EaseUS Todo Backup. This option helps you to clone your system windows from one disc to the other. When the used space on the hard drive is greater than that of total size of Solid State Drive that is quite general, thus you can only understand the migrating OS to SSD. As your SSD is greater than that of boot drive and used space on your PC, you can easily clone the OS from hard drive to solid state drive beyond any boot problems. For another partition style of hard drive, you may select manual copy of data files on them regarding to other HDD. You may also use the partition style clone characters within the EaseUS Todo Backup to gather functions performed.

Fixing of boot issues after disk cloning

After cloning of HDD to SSD, some users complain that their Solid State Drive would not boot properly. There are some basic reasons for this problem and proper guide for fixing these issues;

• Incorrect boot order: You would not be able to load your computer, if the SSD is not the first boot order. To identify either the boot order is correct or not, restart your PC, click on the prompted key to enter the BIOS, and adjust the Solid State Drive as the priority of boot order. Then click F10 to save all changes in PC. Thus, if issue was related to boot order, your system will now boot properly from Solid State Drive.
• MBR/GPT Issue: This means the partition style of target SSD and source disk is invariant and the boot mode is adjusted inappropriately. If you are trying to clone MBR from GPT disk or GPT from MBR disk, you may face such type issues. It should be clear that partition structure must be same on the target disk and source device. Moreover, disc of MBR boot only with the help of legacy mode within the BIOS, whereas GPT with UEFI mode as well. Fix the right boot mode to boot in a proper way or may change the legacy with respect to UEFI boot mode regarding to GPT disk.
• Installed cloned SSD with incorrect hardware: You can try to back up the images to SSD with the help of ‘Universal Restore’, if you have system image or source disk image.
• Cloning process of SSD ran into conflicts: Cloning SSD may face some unexpected problems, thus we recommend you to repeat whole procedure to analyze whether the error has been fixed or not. On the other hand, if you clone HDD to SSD on a new PC system, install SSD, and you have to activate 7/8/10 windows in the operating system. You must use the real product key to get help from Microsoft Office.