How to clone your hard drive to an ssd

The installation of an SSD disk is one of the greatest successes that every user of a laptop or desktop computer can do, the advantages of this type of storage are undeniable compared to traditional mechanical disks. One of the difficulties of this process is that surely we do not want to lose the data we have on our current hard drive, to fix it we can clone the content to the new SSD so that once this is installed everything will continue to be as before. How to clone your hard drive to an SSD.

Everything you need to know to clone your hard drive step by step

Cloning the hard disk is a process that we can define as making an exact copy of its contents on a new disk, this way once we have replaced the old disk with the new one everything will remain the same as if we had not touched anything, with it We save ourselves the need to reinstall Windows and we keep all the content.

The first thing that we have to take into account to clone your hard disk is that the new disk must have a capacity at least equal to that of the old hard disk, in this way we will not have any space problem when cloning

The next step to clone your hard drive would be to review our current hard drive, before cloning it is recommended that we make sure that everything is in place and delete everything that we do not want to keep to save space on the new SSD, we should also defragment the disk if it is mechanical and finally pass an updated antivirus. Defragmentation should be the last step

Then we must make a backup of our current hard drive, this is a security measure that we take in case any problem appears during the process, so we make sure not to lose any file in case the process goes wrong for any reason. The important thing is that this backup is stored on an external storage medium, a large-capacity flash drive or an external hard drive.

SSD vs HDD: Everything you need to know

After all this we will be ready to clone the disk to our new SSD, for this process we must use specialized software such as Acronis True Image, the best of all, although it is paid. As free alternatives we have CloneZilla, WinToHDD and PartClone. Once we have installed the cloning software we will have to turn off the computer, connect the new SSD and turn it on again to proceed with the cloning.

The cloning process is different in each application, although all of them follow a more or less the same pattern: choose the source disk, choose the destination disk, configure the settings for cloning, start the process and wait.

Clone hard drive to SSD with WinToHDD

We are going to detail the process of cloning the disk with WinToHDD, we have chosen this tool as it is the easiest to use of the three free proposals. Once downloaded we just have to install it like any other program.

We open the program and we find this window that indicates the different functions of the program, this time we are going to use " clone system ". In this example the system is already installed on an SSD and we are going to clone it on an HDD, in case it were to clone from an HDD to an SSD the process would be the same.

The next window will ask us to choose the partition that contains the system that we want to clone, in our case it is Windows 8.1 that is on disk 2 and partition 1.

The next step is to choose the destination disk from the dropdown menu.

Once the disk is chosen we have to choose the destination partitions for the system and the boot loader, we recommend choosing the same for both in order to avoid possible problems.

Click on next, accept the message that will appear and let the system work.

Once the cloning your hard disk operation is finished, we will have the contents of the cloned hard disk in the new SSD, the next step is to configure the BIOS so that the computer boots from the SSD by default. To enter the BIOS we must turn off the computer, press the power button and hold down F8, F9, F10 or similar at the moment the computer starts to boot. Once inside the BIOS we have to find the order of the boot sequence and put the SSD first. We save the changes and restart the computer.

If we have done everything right, the computer should boot from the SSD, everything will continue as before, but the system will be much faster when it comes to booting, shutting down, opening applications and all kinds of tasks.