Free Windows 10 HDD Clone Software

Why do users need to clone hard drive?

As we all know, a hard drive is a form of a disk that is assembled with microscopic components. After several years, HDD will suffer from a shortage of disk space and slow functioning. Natural aging may also create certain mistakes in your HDD due to the physical wear and tear of those little parts. In such cases, replacing the old HDD with a better disk is a fairly common solution, especially for those who have higher needs for hardware.

▶ Usually, users will choose to clone a hard drive for:

•Replace HDD with larger HDD to get more capacity
•Migrate Windows OS to SSD
•Upgrade to a new or bigger HDD or SSD for better performance
•Create an exact duplicate of your disks or partitions for backup
•Simply install a new drive to get rid of the disk failure dilemma
•Transfer data to other storage devices
…

Best free Windows 10 HDD clone software

No matter what reason makes you want to transfer data from HDD to another disk, cloning the disk is the most convenient method for avoiding reinstalling the Windows system and programs. To reach the requirements of safety, usability, and simplicity, AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard is the best free hard drive cloning software for Windows users.

This software is a disk and partition manager for Windows 11/10/8/8.1/7/XP to efficiently manage Windows devices.

All supported Windows can use this tool to clone all common disk brands such as Samsung, Crucial, WD, and different disk types like SATA/M.2/NVMe. With only some clicks, you can easily and securely clone your HDD to a new disk.

How to clone a hard drive via clone software?

In this part, we’ll show you how to use AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard to clone an MBR partitioned data disk to another smaller MBR SSD. If you need to clone the system HDD/SSD to another disk, please upgrade to the Professional Edition which also supports MBR to GPT and GPT to MBR disk clone, so you don’t need to convert the disk to MBR/GPT before cloning.

Now, let’s start to clone HDD.

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".

Tip: If you wish to only clone OS to another disk, you can choose the “Migrate OS to SSD” feature.

Bonus tips: Boot from the cloned disk

After you clone to a new disk, you might need to boot from your new disk.

▶ If you want to keep 2 disks:

Step 1. Restart PC and press F2 (F8,F10, DEL...) to enter BIOS settings. In the Boot option, select new HDD/SSD as the new boot drive.

Step 2. Exit BIOS and restart the computer.

▶ If you only need the new disk:

Step 1. Unplug the old disk and make sure the new disk is connected steadily.

Step 2. Restart your computer and try to boot some apps to check.

To sum up

With the free Windows 10 HDD clone software, we introduced in this guide, you can easily clone a hard drive to SSD. AOMEI Partition Assistant has many helpful features, users can conveniently manage their computers via functions like file systems converter, app mover, wipe/erase disk, allocate free space, etc.

What’s more, you can choose the Server Edition to securely and conveniently organize your Windows Server 2025/2022/2019/2016/2012(R2)/2008(R2)/2003.