Best Windows Hard Drive Mirroring Software in 2024

What Is Hard Drive Mirroring Software?

What is HDD mirroring? Disk mirroring is the replication of data across two or more disks. Hard drive mirroring software is a kind of third-party software which can help you mirror/clone/image/copy data from one hard drive to another, usually from old small hard disks to new large ones. Here, it will introduce you two hard drive cloning software developed by AOMEI technology which can both migrate data from one drive to another for you quickly and safely.

AOMEI Partition Assistant

The tool mainly provides cloning functionality. It offers disk cloning, partition cloning and system migration features. With the help of this tool, you can create backups, upgrade to a bigger hard disk or a faster one, or set up multiple identical systems.

Hard Drive Cloning Software Download:

Besides, it can serve as Windows Disk Management (DM) alternative to extend/shrink volume, create/delete volume, format volume, change drive letter, etc. It can do what DM can’t do, such as merge partitions, allocate free space, copy disk and migrate OS to SSD.

AOMEI Backupper

A professional backup and restore software. It can easily complete file/system/disk/partition backup & restore, disk/system/partition clone as well as file sync. As for destination, you can backup, clone or sync to local disks (HDD, SSD, etc.); external devices such as USB flash drive, PenDrive and ThumbDrive; NAS/network share; cloud storages like Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive. You can also set a schedule (daily, weekly or monthly) to your backup or sync task.

How to Use Hard Drive Mirroring Software?

First of all, choose which hard drive imaging software you would like to make use of, AOMEI Backupper or AOMEI Partition Assistant? Download, install and launch the edition you have chosen. Then, follow the steps to use the free cloning software or disk mirroring tool.

Hard Drive Mirroring Software Free – AOMEI Backupper Standard

Step 1. In its main interface under Clone column, select “Disk Clone”.

Step 2. Select the disk you want to clone as source disk.

Step 3. Choose another hard drive as destination.

Note: The destination hard disk will be wiped out. Backup or copy important data out and then continue.

Step 4. Disk clone operation summary. If everything is what you planed, just click “Start Clone”.

Hard Drive Cloning Software – AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional

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 the destination disk to store the data on the source 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 SSD if the target disk is an SSD drive.

Step 5. At last, click "Apply" and "Proceed" in the main interface to start cloning the hard drive.

What is the difference between cloning and mirroring a hard drive?

What is the difference between cloning and mirroring a hard drive?

Before comparing AOMEI Backupper and AOMEI Partition Assistant, let's understand more information about cloning and mirroring a hard drive?

• Hard disk cloning is cloning all partitions and data from one hard disk to another. After cloning, you will have two identical hard disks, disk cloning is more important for hard disk replacement or hard disk upgrading
• Mirror backup is a normal copy of selected folders and files from one location to another at a specific moment. Mirroring is usually used for preventive backups. When mirroring a hard disk, you will have multiple hard disks with the same data. However, it does not create a separate, bootable copy of the entire system as cloning does.

As you can see above, both AOMEI Backupper and AOMEI Partition Assistant can help you easily complete hard drive mirroring tasks. Then, which one should you choose? What are the differences between the two tools as for the hard drive clone feature? 

Clone or copy method

Both software provides you two ways of hard drive imaging, only clone the used space or copy the whole disk. In Backupper, they are called an intelligent clone, default option if do not tick “Sector by sector clone” in the summary step. In Partition Assistant, it will ask you to choose a method at the begging of Copy Disk Wizard, “Copy Disk Quickly” (default) or “Sector-by-sector Copy”.

Edit partitions / edit disk

• Copy without resizing partitions: Do not do any changes. The source disk configuration will be copied on the new disk with same partition size. (default)

• Fit partitions to entire disk: The partitions will automatically change their size in proportion to their original size to fit the entire target disk.

• Edit partitions on this disk: Manually adjust the partition size and location by dragging and moving the graphical partition bar.

You can choose to edit partitions size in summary step in Backupper while Partition Assistant will automatically pops up you to select after choosing target disk.

Note: If you have chosen sector by sector clone way no matter in Backupper or Partition Assistant, you can’t edit partitions.

Optimize SSD

If the destination disk is an SSD, you can choose this option to improve the performance of it. Still, you can tick this option in the summary screen of Backupper. While, in Partition Assistant, it is placed under the bottom of selecting the destination window.

In general, for hard drive mirroring software for Windows 10/7/8, both AOMEI Backupper and AOMEI Partition Assistant are. They are both easy and quick to operate. For how to choose one, it depends all on you. Maybe you can select according to your preference for UI or the other features of the software.