[Ultimate guide]: Clone HDD to SSD Crucial without Losing Data

Why clone HDD to SSD Crucial?

Crucial is one of the largest memory and storage manufacturers in the world, offering SATA SSD, mSATA SSD, M.2 NVMe SSD, and external SSD. Compared to other brands of SDD, Crucial SSD are loved by computer users around the world for their superior performance, quality, and durability.

When booting the computer with Crucial SSD, the computer starts up very fast. And it can also greatly improve the speed of loading applications, bringing a completely different experience to users, especially game users.

Because of these characteristics of Crucial SSD, many users regard Crucial SSD as one of the best ways to improve computer performance. However, you don't want to reinstall programs, even Windows system. So, cloning HDD to Crucial SSD is a good idea.

Free download the Crucial SSD clone software in Windows 11/10/8/7

To complete the Crucial HDD to SSD clone, you might try the Crucial SSD installation kit. That's good, because it almost contains everything, including the USB to SATA cable, 3.5-inch adapter bracket, mounting screws, and disk transfer software. However, the disk transfer software is not perfect, because it is not incompatible with the GPT disk.

How to find the replacement? I highly recommend you use AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, which is a reliable SSD migration tool. It not only supports cloning Crucial SSD, but also supports cloning other brands of SSD, such as Samsung, SanDisk, WD, Toshiba, etc. You can benefit a lot from the following features:

✦ Two clone options: It offers Clone Disk Quickly and Sector-by-Sector Clone. The former can clone only used sectors to the target disk, which means clone large HDD to smaller Crucial SSD; the latter allows clone the entire disk to the target disk, including bad sectors.
✦ Cloning disk without rebooting: Its "Hot Clone" technology supports clone disk while you keep working. In other words, you don't have to reboot your computer to run the cloning process.
✦ Clone failing hard drive: When the computer fails to boot normally, it can also clone hard drive from boot.

★Tips:

 For cloning data disk from HDD to Crucial SSD, Standard Version is enough. For cloning the system disk to Crucial SSD, you should switch to Professional Edition.

In addition, it also supports only migrate OS to Crucial SSD while keeping other data on the HDD.

How to clone HDD to Crucial SSD without data loss

Before cloning, we need to connect the Crucial SSD to the computer and make sure it is detected.

◥ According to your Crucial SSD type (SATA SSD, mSATA SSD, or NVMe SSD), prepare an appropriate USB cable and connect it to the PC.

◥ You can also install the SSD manually:

▶ Turn off the computer and open the case.

▶ Find the SSD slot. Desktops are usually easy to find slots, but laptops have a different slot location—usually under the bottom plate or under the keyboard.

▶ Insert the SSD. When securing the disk, it may be necessary to insert the screws into the mounts provided on the motherboard, do not over-tighten the screws.

▶ After firmly fixing the SSD in the slot, put the computer back in its original position and turn on the computer.

After turning on the computer, initialize the SSD and set the partition style to be the same as the HDD. Now, it’s time to clone HDD to SSD Crucial.

Step 1. Install and run the Crucial SSD migration tool. Click "Clone" in the main interface, and select "Clone Disk".

Step 2. Choose the HDD disk as the source disk and click "Next".

Step 3. Select the SSD 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 5. After returning to the main interface, check the pending operation and click "Apply" and "Proceed" to commit the operation.

After the process is over, if you cloned a system disk and need to keep both the HDD and Crucial SSD on the computer, you may need to enter the BIOS to set Crucial SSD as the boot drive.

Conclusion

This is the whole process of cloning HDD to SSD Crucial. With the help of AOMEI Partition Assistant, you can clone disk without any issues and boot from it successfully.

In addition, there are more advanced features are waiting for you to unlock, such as allocating free space, moving installed programs to another drive, converting MBR to GPT without losing data, and more. If you are running Windows Server 2025/2022/2019/2016/2012, and 2003, please turn to Server Edition.