Is Cloning a Hard Drive Safe? Here’s the Answer!

Is cloning a hard drive safe?

 

I bought a new SSD. I know that SSD performance is better than HDD, so I want to clone the HDD that I am using to SSD. But I am not sure if a hard drive can be cloned, and it is 100% safe. Because there are some important files, games and operating system on it. What should I do to not lose data? Any help would be greatly appreciated.”

 

What is cloning hard drive?

Hard drive cloning, also known as disk cloning or drive cloning. To put it simply, it refers to copy the contents of a hard drive to a replacement hard drive. Cloning a hard drive can avoid the process of time-consuming reinstall the system and reconfigure settings. And cloning is very safe, it plays a significant role in managing and protecting data. 

The best way to clone a hard drive to SSD is to seek the help of third-party software. Fortunately, with the rise of third-party software, much excellent cloning software has emerged. Here, I highly recommend you to use AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional (suitable for Windows 10/8/7/Vista/XP users), which is one of the best disk partition management tool on the market. It can clone all the files of the old hard drive (including the operating system) to the new hard drive without data loss, and the cloned OS and apps can be successfully booted in the new hard drive. I believe it can completely dispel your worries about “Is cloning a hard drive safe?”

It is not only safe but also easy to operate, the GUI allows you to understand fully at a glance. Even if you are a non-technical person, you can do it by yourself. If you need to clone a hard drive, then it is a nice choice. Hurry up and download the demo version to try it out!

How to clone a hard drive safely?

AOMEI Partition Assistant provides two cloning methods: Clone Disk Quickly and Sector-by-Sector Clone. The former refers to fast cloning of used sectors to the target disk or partition, allowing the capacity of the target disk to be smaller than the capacity of the original disk. The latter refers to clone all sectors of the original disk to the new disk, so the capacity of the new disk is required to be equal to or larger than the original disk. If you clone the HDD to the SSD, you also can tick “Optimize the performance of SSD” to improve the read and write speed of SSD by 4K alignment.

Now, I will show you how to clone hard drive to SSD step by step. 

Tip: Before cloning starts, you need to connect the SSD to the computer with a SATA to USB cable, and make sure that the machine can detect it successfully.

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.

Note: After that, if you need to use it, you can remove the old hard drive and change the boot sequence in the BIOS to boot computer from SSD.

Conclusion

“Is cloning a hard drive safe?” After reading this article, this will no longer be a problem for you. Because AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional can meet all your needs for disks. If enterprise users want to use these functions in Windows Server, it is recommended you to upgrade to AOMEI Partition Assistant Server.