How To Clone Your HDD To An SSD

Despite their huge storage capacities and better gigabyte-per-dollar ratio, even the best spinning hard drives have extremely slow read and write speeds compared to a solid-state drive, especially if you’re using your HDD as the boot drive. If your PC takes ages to launch an app and even longer to boot up, swapping your mechanical hard drive with an SSD is the cheapest and easiest way to improve its performance.

If you’ve bought a brand-new SSD but don’t know how to transfer all the files from your hard drive without losing any important documents, no worries! This guide will give you all the information you’ll need to clone the contents of your HDD to an SSD.

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Before you begin

Make sure you have both the SSD and the hard drive plugged into your system before initiating the cloning procedure. M.2 SSDs need to be slotted into the M.2 slot on your motherboard and can be secured with the help of an M2x3mm screw. Meanwhile, SATA SSDs are a little more complex to set up; you’ll have to use a SATA cable to plug the drive into the motherboard, and power it using a 15-pin SATA cable from the PSU.

Install Macrium Reflect

I’ve used Macrium Reflect Home Edition as an example because it offers the most essential features in its free 30-day trial period, but the steps are similar for other disk cloning tools. To configure with the latest version of Macrium Reflect, follow these steps:

1. Head to the download page for Macrium Reflect and choose 64-bit from the drop-down menu.
2. You’ll need to register using a valid email ID to get the latest version of Macrium Reflect
3. Click on Download Trial under Reflect Home.
4. Run the Setup.exe file with admin privileges once it finishes downloading, and press Next when the setup wizard appears. Accept the user license agreement, then select Next three times.
5. Enter the email address and the registration code you received after signing up on Macrium Reflect’s website, and press Next.
6. Configure the custom installation settings as per your needs and press Next. Click on the Install button and reboot your system once the setup wizard finishes installing Macrium Reflect.

Clone the HDD partitions to the SSD

Now that you’ve installed Macrium Reflect, it’s time to clone all the files and partitions of the hard drive to the SSD.

1. Run Macrium Reflect as an administrator.
2. Select the drive of your choice (the hard drive of origin) and choose Clone this disk…

   

3. Click on Select a disk to clone to… and pick the SSD you installed earlier as the destination disk.
4. In case your SSD has a different storage capacity than your HDD, click on Copy Partitions and press Finish after selecting Shrink or extend to fill the target disk.
5. Choose OK when prompted to create a backup definition file.
6. Finally, press Continue on the Confirm Override pop-up window to begin the cloning procedure.
7. Once Macrium Reflect is done cloning your HDD partitions, click on the Finish button.

   Since cloning your HDD will delete all the data on the destination disk (if it isn’t empty) be sure to double-check the name of the drive before you click the Continue button.

Setting the SSD as the boot drive (optional)

If you want to use the SSD as the primary boot drive, you’ll need to enter the BIOS and modify your system’s boot priority.

1. Restart your system.
2. Keep tapping the Of the key during the startup sequence to enter the BIOS.
3. Navigate to the Boot tab.
4. Choose the SSD you configured earlier as the Boot Option #1.
5. Click the Exit or X button and save your BIOS configuration before rebooting your system.

Now you’re ready to use your new SSD

And that’s it! Assuming you’ve followed the steps above, your system should reboot into Windows 11 using the new SSD. If you haven’t already purchased one, there are plenty of great SSDs that you can slot into your PC to improve its performance.