[Stepwise] How to Mirror Hard Drive to SSD Without Any Reinstalling?

Why mirror hard drive to SSD?

Most people want to mirror hard drive to SSD because they hope to have better disk use experience. On the one hand, the prices of SSD are gradually decreasing.  On the other hand, the interest in SSDs has grown more noticeably with the well-known manufacturers introducing its own powerful disk, such as Samsung EVO, PRO, and QVO series, Western Digital (WD) Black SN850, Sandisk, WD Blue, Kingston A2000, and so on.

These SSDs are also available with a variety of interfaces, including PCI-Express, mSATA, M.2 SSD, and standard SATA, these offering flexibility and improved performance for different computing needs. In addition to this reason, cloning hard drive to SSD also brings the following attractive 2 benefits:

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 do not clone the system correctly. So, here, a professional third-party software utility will be introduced to help clone HDD to SSD in Windows 11, 10, 8, 7.

AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard is such a great HDD and SSD clone software. Its "Disk Clone Wizard" allows you to clone HDD to SSD/HDD, or vice versa in a few simple mouse-clicks. It can meet various disk cloning needs compared to many other software. For example, you can easily clone a large disk to a smaller one without limitations. Besides, it can be compatible with disk interfaces and support cloning for both basic/dynamic disks and MBR/GPT disk.

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 AOMEI Partition Professional.

What's even better, you can repartition hard drive during hard drive to SSD clone so that you can use the SSD directly after clone. You can free download it and use it to mirror a hard drive to SSD with ease.

AOMEI Partition Assistant

The Best Windows Disk Partition Manager and PC Optimizer

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Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7

How to mirror hard drive to SSD with AOMEI Partition Assistant 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. 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.

Then, you can download and install AOMEI Partition Assistant and start copying HDD to SSD as the following guide:

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.

After copying, you can boot computer from the destination SSD by changing the boot mode. If you don't how to do that after mirroring hard drive to SSD, you can move to the next part.

Boot Windows from the mirrored SSD after cloning

If you cloned the system disk and kept both the HDD and SSD on the computer, you may need to go into the BIOS to set SSD as the boot drive.

Step 1. Reboot your PC and constantly press F2, Del, F8, or F12 to access the BIOS menu. 

Step 2. You can use the arrow key to choose the Boot tab.

Step 3. Then move the cloned SSD to the first position in the list. Save the changes and exit the BIOS setup utility.

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.