As time goes by, our computer hard drive is filled up with all kinds of data. Consequently, our computer gets slower and slower. It is frustrating that the computer costs forty or fifty seconds to boot up while it only costs ten seconds before. What’s more, it drives us crazy when we get stuck on opening an application or editing Word or Excel files.
How to speed up our computers? Replacing the computer’s hard drive is the answer. Generally, there are two ways to go.
- Get a larger drive, such as replacing 500GB HDD with 1TB HDD, upgrading 256GB SSD to 512GB SSD, etc.
- Get a faster drive. For example, we can clone HDD to SSD or replace SATA SSD with NVMe SSD, etc.
Speaking of replacing a computer’s hard drives, transferring data from the old drive to the new drive is the most important part. To ensure the system is bootable and personal data is intact after hard drive replacement, reliable hard drive cloning software is indispensable.
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Best disk cloning software in Windows 11, 10, 8, 7
If you are searching for specialized yet free cloning software for Windows 10, AOMEI Backupper Standard Edition is the best choice. It has remarkable clone features to help you transfer data from one hard drive to another.
★ What data will be cloned?
AOMEI Backupper Standard offers two clone types: Disk Clone and Partition Clone. If you use Disk Clone to copy a system disk, everything on the system disk will be copied, including Windows OS, installed applications, and personal files.
You can also use Partition Clone to clone a specific partition like D: drive or E: drive. Partitions of different file systems are supported, such as NTFS, FAT32, FAT16, exFAT, etc.
★ What are the cloning methods?
Two cloning methods are built into this program: Intelligent Clone and Sector-By-Sector Clone. By default, AOMEI Backupper will run Intelligent Clone, which means only the used space of the source disk will be cloned. This method is quite useful when you want to clone a larger drive to a smaller drive.
If you want to keep the same partition layout on the destination disk, you can choose Sector-By-Sector Clone, which will clone both the used and unused space of the source disk. The precondition of using this feature is the destination disk should have at least the same capacity as the source disk.
★ What disk types are supported?
AOMEI Backupper allows you to clone various storage devices, including HDDs, SSDs, USB sticks, SD cards, memory cards, and so on. And it supports SATA, mSATA, U.2, M.2, and PCIe interfaces. You don’t need to worry that you are cloning two disks of different interfaces, because the program guarantees you a smooth cloning process.
Easily transfer data from HDD to SSD
Before you start, please connect the target SSD to your computer and make sure it is recognized by Windows. Then, backup files on the SSD if it is not empty, or you’ll lose your files after cloning. Now follow the guidance below to perform a disk clone:
Step 1. Download this free drive cloning software and install it on your PC. Load AOMEI Backupper, click Clone, and select Disk Clone.
Step 2. When you are at the Source Disk page, select the old hard drive on your computer and click Next.
Step 3. Select the SSD you just connected at the Destination Disk page. Then click Next to continue.
Step 4. To improve the overall performance of the destination SSD, you may check the SSD Alignment option. Finally, click Start Clone to begin data migration from the old HDD to the new SSD.
Step 5. The cloning process will run in the background. After the process is completed, click Finish.
After cloning, you can swap the old HDD for the new SSD and boot your computer from the new SSD. You’ll find your computer works like before – it has the same system settings and applications, and all your files are kept intact. If you’d like to copy SSD to a new SSD in Windows 10, you can follow these instructions as well.
What’s more pleasing, AOMEI Backupper is the best backup software for Windows 11/10/8/7. You can use it to create a system backup image and disk image as per your need. Backing up specific files and folders is also supported. Why not give it a try?