How to Mirror Hard Drive to SSD in Windows 11, 10, 8, 7 for Free?

With the free AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, you can easily mirror hard drive to SSD drive without reinstalling everything in Windows 10, 8, 7. A complete guide on how to mirror hard disk to SSD will be given.

Cherry

By Cherry / Updated on May 12, 2023

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Why mirror hard drive to SSD?

Many people would like to mirror their hard drive to a larger disk when there’s no sufficient storage space. But nowadays, people usually mirror their hard drive to an SSD. How come since we all know an SSD is generally smaller than an HDD at the same price? You’ll understand why to do it in the following contents.

● It protects you from data loss. There’re many causes of data loss during computer use. However, if you’ve already mirrored the hard drive to an SSD, then, you won’t run into this trouble since you can easily restore your data from the mirrored SSD.

● It can upgrade and speed up your PC. No matter desktop or laptop users, you all want it to run fast. Well, the SSD is more stable and runs faster than HDD. If you want to upgrade your PC, replacing HDD with an SSD is a good way to upgrade and speed up your PC - you can upgrade HDD to SSD without reinstalling OS and programs in this way.

The software for mirroring hard disk to SSD

It’s never easy to mirror a hard drive to an SSD as you cannot just copy everything from one disk to another which is likely to cause severe data loss and prevents you from booting from the destination disk if you mirror the system. So, here, a third-party software utility will be introduced to help mirror hard drive to SSD in Windows 11, 10, 8, 7.

AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard is such a great HDD and SSD clone software utility that you can use to clone hard drive to SSD. Its “Disk Clone Wizard” allows you to clone HDD to SSD, or clone a hard drive to another hard drive in a few simple mouse-clicks. What’s more, you can repartition hard drive during HDD to SSD clone so that you can use the SSD directly after clone.

How to mirror hard drive to SSD step by step?

Here we will show you how to mirror a hard drive to SSD without reinstalling OS and losing data.

What you should prepare in advance:

A computer installed Windows OS. Here, the computer installed a hard drive with Windows OS. AOMEI Partition Assistant works on Windows all editions of 11/10/8/7/Vista/XP. The hard drive with Windows OS is the drive you are going to mirror.

A solid-state drive. This solid-state drive is the drive you’ll be mirroring to. The SSD should be equal to or larger than the source drive’s used space.

 Check bad sectors on the destination hard drive. You can’t boot your computer from an SSD with bad sectors. So, you’d better first check whether there're bad sectors and repair the hard drive if there're with some third-party bad sector repair software.

Make a backup of the HDD. If you don’t want to lose any data during the disk clone, then, make a backup first so you can restore the computer to the previous state when something unexpected happens. 

Back up the SSD data. The content in the target disk will be deleted during the operation. If there is any important data on the target disk, back it up first.

USB-to-SATA adapter. If what you have is a laptop with only one hard drive bay, then, it’s necessary to get a USB-to-SATA adapter.

SATA TO USB

Then, you can download and install AOMEI Partition Assistant and start mirror hard drive to SSD as the following guide:

Download Freeware Win 11/10/8.1/8/7/XP
Secure Download

 

Step 1. Launch AOMEI Partition Assistant. You will see the basic environment of your hard drives. Click “Clone Disk” in the right menu.

Disk Copy

Step 2. Choose a way to copy HDD to SSD. Here we highly recommend “Clone Disk Quickly” because it will only copy the used space of the disk to another disk, with this option, you can easily clone hard drive to a smaller SSD.

Option

Step 3. Choose the disk you want to mirror, and click "Next".

Source Disk

Step 4. Select the SSD as the destination disk. Here you should check the option of “Optimize the performance of SSD” because it will align SSD so that it will be in the best status after clone.

Target Disk

Step 5. Here you can edit partition on the destination hard drive. Or you can resize partition with AOMEI Partition Assistant later.

Edit

Note: if you select Sector-by-Sector Clone before, you cannot edit partition size. 

Step 6. After that, AOMEI Partition Assistant will give you a note on how to boot from the SSD after clone. Read it, and click Finish.

Note

Step 7. You will be sent back to the main interface. Click Apply at the toolbar to submit the whole progress.

Apply

After copying, you can boot computer from the destination SSD by changing the boot mode.

Note:✎...
for mirroring Windows system hard drive to SSD, the free Standard edition only supports MBR to MBR data disk clone. If you are cloning MBR system disk,  MBR to GPT, GPT to MBR or GPT to GPT disk, please upgrade to Professional.

Conclusion

Using AOMEI Partition Assistant to mirror hard drive to SSD is such a simple thing. It can be operated so easily that even a newbie can handle it. Besides coping hard drive to SSD, it has many other functions like migrating OS to SSD/HDD, converting between MBR disk and GPT disk without deleting any partitions, etc. If you are Windows Sever users, AOMEI Partition Assistant Server is suitable for you.

Cherry
Cherry · Staff Editor
Cherry is an editor of AOMEI Technology, she covers backup & restore, hard disk & partitions management, cloud files transfer, website & database backup and so on for AOMEI. She enjoys helping people find solutions to their problems. She loves traveling, cooking, reading and so on. She takes most of time with her family when she is not working.