AOMEI Partition Assistant
How to Ghost Hard Drive to SSD in Windows 10, 8, 7?
How can you ghost hard drive to SSD if you wish to ghost copy HDD? This post will show you how to ghost clone hard drive to SSD in Windows with easy operation.
By Emily / Updated on August 1, 2024
Scenario
“Recently, I bought a Dell computer with a 750GB hard drive, Windows 10 Pro. I want to transfer it to a Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB. Can I just ghost hard drive to the new SSD without reinstalling OS and other programs? Any one can tell how to do it step by step? Thanks!”
Why you need to ghost hard drive to SSD?
"Ghosting" a hard drive to an SSD, also known as cloning or imaging, involves creating an exact copy of your existing hard drive (HDD) and transferring it to a solid-state drive (SSD). This process includes copying the operating system, applications, settings, and all data to the new SSD, allowing you to seamlessly transition to the new drive without reinstalling everything from scratch.
And after this cloning operation, the SSD contains the exact data as the old hard drive. It can be a great solution for disk upgrade, replacement and backup.
▶ Ghost hard drive to SSD can:
✍ Improved Performance: If the hard drive is used for a long time, its available space will be smaller and the computer will run slower, then you can ghost the hard disk to SSD and replace the old one. If your system boots and runs slowly on the HDD, you can also upgrade it to an SSD drive by ghosting it. SSDs are significantly faster than traditional HDDs. Ghosting to an SSD can dramatically improve boot times, application load times, and overall system responsiveness.
✍ Increased Reliability: SSDs have no moving parts, making them more durable and less prone to mechanical failure compared to HDDs, which have spinning disks and read/write heads.
✍ Gain Data Protection: The hard drive failure always happens, in order to avoid data loss during the accident, you can clone the HDD to another drive for a complete backup.
Best alternative to Norton Ghost to easily run ghost disk cloning
The term "Ghost" originates from a cloning and backup tool called Norton Ghost. This software provided various options, such as Partition to Partition, Disk to Disk, Partition to Image, etc. Due to its popularity, many people still refer to the process of cloning or imaging a hard drive as "ghosting." However, Norton Ghost was discontinued in 2013 because it couldn't keep up with modern advancements.
To ghost copy hard drive to SSD smoothly, you can turn to a third-party hard drive ghosting tool like AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. It is a powerful disk partition manager and compatible with all editions of Windows 11/10/8/7(either 32-bit and 64-bit).
It has the “Clone Disk” function, which allows you to ghost your hard drive to SSD very conveniently in Windows PC. Besides, it is possible to clone a larger disk to smaller disk by the “Clone Disk Quickly” method as long as the destination disk space is bigger than the used space of the source disk.
🤗1. Compatible with Windows 11/10/8/7, this software efficiently transfers data between various branded HDDs and SSDs.
🔧2. You have the option to select either the entire disk or specific partitions for ghosting. Cloning just the operating system is a viable option as well.
📎 3. The target disk may not have the same size as the source disk, but that's not a problem. This tool will only copy the used sectors by default, making it possible to clone a larger HDD to a smaller SSD. In addition, the software offers the option to clone your hard drive using a sector-by-sector clone mode, allowing for a meticulous and precise duplication of every bit of data.
✨4. The operations are straightforward and user-friendly for all users.
How to ghost hard drive to SSD in Windows 11/10/8/7
Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant, click "Clone" in the main interface, and select "Clone Disk".
Step 2. Choose the hard disk that you need to clone as the source disk and click "Next".
Step 3. Select another drive as the destination disk, and then click "Next".
Step 4. Then, you can check the source and destination disk in the next window or change to "Sector to Sector clone", and click the "Confirm" button to continue if there is no problem.
Here, you can also click the "Settings" button to adjust the partition size on the destination disk or tick "4k alignment" to improve the reading and writing speed of the SSD.
Step 6. You can preview the disk cloning operation by viewing the "Pending Operations". To commit the "Pending Operations", please click "Apply" and "Proceed".
If you are cloning the system disk, you should note the partition style of the source and target disk. Cloning MBR system disk to GPT disk, you have to change Legacy boot mode to UEFI/EFI in order to boot PC from the cloned disk. The vice versa is also true.
Summary
With the help of AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro, you can ghost hard drive to SSD easily and effectively in Windows 10/8/7. Besides disk clone, it also provides you many other powerful functions like resize/delete/create/split/merge/move partition, clone partition, rebuild MBR, wipe hard drive, SSD secure erase and so on. And you can also migrate OS to new hard drive with this tool, too. If you want to apply AOMEI Partition Assistant on Server, you can try the AOMEI Partition Assistant Server edition.
