Switching from a traditional spinning disk to an SSD solid-state drive is one of the must-have hardware upgrades for a machine that’s a few years old. And it is what is proven that the reading and writing of data in a modern SSD solid state drive is much faster, therefore, the loading of Windows 10 and its applications.
Fortunately, this kind of modification is not very complicated and can be done by any average user in two ways. One of them is to put the new SSD in the place of the conventional disk and configure the system from scratch, which is equivalent to reinstalling Windows 10 and all the user’s favorite programs on said drive.
But there is another way to avoid these procedures: it consists of making a clone (exact copy) of the original hard drive on the SSD and then doing the respective exchange. This will copy the operating system and its settings to the upgraded drive.
The only problem that could occur with a disk cloning procedure is finding that the information stored on the source disk exceeds the capacity of the new SSD drive. However, with a good partition job later it can be easily fixed.
To perform this modification you will have to use the Macrium Reflect program (actually, you can use MiniTool Partition Wizard https://www.partitionwizard.com/ or any other similar tool but the result is the same) and connect the SSD drive to a port USB of your PC by means of an adapter quite easy to obtain. The steps are the following:
How to clone HDD to SSD in Windows 10
To get started, connect the SSD drive to your computer.
Download a trial version of Macrium Reflect and follow the instructions of its installation wizard to run the program on your PC. Here is the link to its download page: https://www.macrium.com/reflect8trial.
Open Macrium Reflect and in the Local Disks tab select the source disk or the partitions of it that you choose. Then click on Clone this disk…
In the window that opens, click Select a disk to clone to… and select the SSD solid state drive.
Now, drag the partitions from the original disk to this drive and click Next. The Schedule this Clone window will open immediately, the function of which is to schedule the task for a later time. If you don’t plan to do it this way, click Next.
To start the process, review the information sheet and click Finish.
Wait for the process to finish. Then unplug the SSD drive. Shut down your PC and replace the old drive with the SSD drive. You may have to use a screwdriver to open the case or compartment that houses the hard drive.
Image by hetmansoftware from Pixabay
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