Brief introduction of SSD & HDD

Before you migrate OS to SSD or HDD, it is necessary to have a basic understanding of SSD and HDD.

HDD - Hard Disk Drive: It is the most basic computer storage device, used to store data. Usually, the local disk containing C, D, and F drives in the computer are all hard disk drives. The capacity of the common disk can be 80G, 160G, 750G, 1TB, or 2TB…. Divided by the volume, there are PATA, SATA, and SCSI…. Among those, PATA is with a large capacity but a low price, so it is suitable for home use. SCSI has a comparatively small capacity and is expensive, but it is with good performance and higher stability, so it is usually applied in a high-tech field.

SSD - Solid State Drive: A kind of hard disk which is made of a solid-state electronic storage chip and consists of the control unit (flash chip) and a storage unit (DRAM - Dynamic Random Access Memory chip). It is the same as a common hard disk in many aspects, like definition, the stipulation of interface, function, usage, appearance, and size. But it runs faster than HDD in reading and writing speed. It is widely used in the military, IT industry, aviation, and many other fields.

Benefits of migrating OS to SSD

If you move Windows to SSD, you can experience faster processing speed in reading and writing, get decreased boot time, and you can boot your computer much faster, avoid the risk of data loss caused by shaking the knocking the drive unintentionally, and enjoy relatively quiet working environment. Or when your current hard drive is almost full, you can move OS to a larger drive. All in all, it is easy to get the motivation to perform OS migration.

How to migrate OS from HDD to SSD easily and safely without reinstallation

Then, how to migrate only OS to SSD or HDD successfully? You can employ AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, which brings a function named "Migrate OS to SSD", specially designed for users who want to quickly move system to HDD or SSD but don’t want to reinstall OS. It also supports migrating OS from MBR/GPT to MBR/GPT. What's more, the hot clone technique allows users to run OS during the OS migration.

Now, please download the Demo version to see how it works:

Prerequisites for OS Migration

• Connect a drive HDD/SSD with enough space as the destination drive to keep migrated OS partitions. During migration, you can either connect the destination drive internally or externally via USB connector during disk clone.
• To make the destination HDD/SSD bootable, please check the disk type MBR/GPT. It is recommended to first convert the destination disk type and make sure it is the same as the source disk.
• Download and install AOMEI Partition Assistant on the computer where you would like to migrate the OS.

It is a paid feature to migrate a current running system to HDD or SSD. Please upgrade to AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, Server, or above versions to use the feature.

How to Migrate OS to SSD in Partition Assistant

In this article, we will take the migration of UEFI boot OS as an example. Please follow the below steps:

1. Connect the SSD to your computer and ensure it can be detected; Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. Click the "Clone" main tab and select "Migrate OS".

2. The Migrate OS to SSD wizard will run. The system-related partitions will be selected as the source by default. This wizard helps you migrate your current OS to SSD or HDD. Please click "Next" to continue.

3. Select the destination location. You can either select a whole disk, a single partition, or an unallocated space as the destination location to save the OS and then click "Next".

Tips:

• The program will detect and list system partitions as the source automatically by default.
• In some cases, your system and boot partitions are located on different drives. In this case, the drive with the boot partition will not be listed to select as the destination location.

4. You will get a reminder that all data on the destination location will be destroyed. If you confirm, please click "Yes" to continue.

 

5. Then, you can preview the source and destination disk. Please click "Next" to continue.

In this page, you can also click the "Settings" button to resize partition and modify other information (including partition size, and drive letter) of the partition on the new disk, of course, you can also keep the default settings. Click "Save" to save the settings.

6. You'll be back to the main interface where you can see the pending operations and preview the result of operation. To commit it, please click "Apply" --> "Proceed"  and the OS migration operation will start.

7. Then, you might be asked to select a mode, either "Restart into Windows PE mode" or "Restart into PreOS mode" to execute the operation because it is a current system drive. Please select one mode you prefer to execute the migration operation.

Tips: If you select the first "Restart into Windows PE mode" and there is no recovery environment on your PC, the process to create WindowsPE will start. Once it is finished, the computer will restart into Windows PE mode to run the operation.

8. The migration will start and you can check the process.

9. Once the migration is finished successfully, you will get a successful window. And then, you can follow the process to boot your PC from the new HDD/SSD.

Conclusion

The OS migration has been finished successfully followed by the above steps. In this way, you can connect the destination drive internally to your computer and boot from it.

The "Migrate OS to SSD" wizard is mainly used in the following situations:

If the system boots slowly from the original HDD, you can use the tool to migrate OS to a larger HDD or SSD to get a faster system boot speed so that you will get better computer performance.

If the original system drive is too old and it is time to exchange, you can use the tool to migrate it and replace with a newer HDD or SSD.

If your original system drive is with insufficient free space, you can use the wizard to migrate OS to a larger HDD or SSD to replace it so that you will get enough drive space.

How to Boot from the SSD

After you migrate the OS to the HDD/SSD, to successfully boot from it, you need to connect the SSD internally to your computer, not through an external connector, for example, USB connector.

And, you must change the boot disk to the SSD in BIOS. Please restart your computer, enter the BIOS setup, change the boot order, set the SSD as the first boot device, and boot the computer from there.

 

 

Notes:
● Before transferring OS from MBR to GPT disk, please confirm that your motherboard supports EFI/UEFI boot.
● To clone all partitions (hidden partitions and data partitions included) to another hard drive, you can use the Disk Clone Wizard.
● After the OS successfully boots from the SSD, you can wipe the HDD to use it as a data disk.

 

FAQs:

Q: Can I migrate OS on another disk, a system disk unplugged from another computer?

A: Currently, it only supports migration of the current PC running system.

Q: Why the drive I would like to migrate to is not listed?

A: The might reason is that your system partition and boot partition are located on different physical drives so both drives are taken as your source system drive.

Q: After migrating the OS, will the source system be deleted or not bootable?

A: Migrating the system won’t take any effect on source system so you can still boot from the source system drive.

Q: Can I manually delete or wipe the original OS drive as a data drive to make full use of the drive space?

A: Once the OS migration is finished and your PC boots from the new drive without any problem, you can delete it as a data drive.