How to Transfer Laptop Hard Drive to SSD

How to transfer laptop hard drive to SSD for better performance? If you don’t know the suitable way to do it, this post will show you how to migrate data from laptop hard drive to SSD without losing data.

Tina

By Tina / Updated on May 12, 2023

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How can I transfer laptop hard drive to SSD?

 

“A week ago, I heard that it would be a better experience to replace the hard drive on the computer with an SSD, because it is faster and more stable. So I bought a new SSD drive for my laptop and I want to use it to replace the old HDD that came with the laptop. Can I transfer laptop hard drive to SSD to get rid of the old hard drive? Looking forward to your advice, thanks. ”

SSD vs HDD: Which is better?

ssd vs hdd

As the two most common data storage devices, hard disk drives (HDD) and solid-state drives (SSD) differ in the following aspects:

✦ Speed: SSD’s read and write speed is faster than HDD.
✦ Price: With the same size of memory, SSD is more expensive than HDD.
✦ Temperature: Without moving parts and the use of the flash memory, SSD is obviously cooler than HDD.
✦ Stability: Since there are no small moving parts just like in HDD, SSD can effectively prevent damage caused by vibration and shock.
✦ Noise: SSD has no parts like spanning platters, so the noise is relatively small.
✦ Size: SSD is smaller and more portable.

Seeing that SSD has the advantages displayed, many people want to transfer laptop hard drive to SSD. But how to do it? Many people are getting confused again, so this article is dedicated to helping you migrate a Hard drive to a SSD smoothly.

The best way to transfer laptop hard drive to SSD

A simple copy and paste may not be able to completely transfer the hard drive to SSD, because there’re still some hidden files in the hard drive. In order to successfully transfer laptop hard drive to SSD, it is very important to use a reliable and powerful disk cloning tool, so we would like to recommend AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional to you.

As a disk clone master, it provides you with more than one way to move the entire hard drive to SSD: Clone Disk Quickly and Sector-by-Sector Clone. The first way only clones the used space, so you can clone a hard drive to a smaller SSD; the second way copies all sectors, even if there are unused or logically incorrect ones. In addition, if you want to move the operating system, you can use the "Migrate OS to SSD" function directly migrate the operating system in the friendly interface.

Of course, this powerful tool has some other strong points: 

It supports all Windows operating systems, including Windows 11/10/8/7/XP/Vista.
Apart from cloning the entire hard drive, you can also clone a single partition as needed.
When the SSD is damaged for some reasons, you can also fix this corrupted SSD easily.
After you successfully transfer the hard drive to SSD, you can also wipe this computer hard drive for other use.

Please download to see how to transfer laptop hard drive to SSD.

Download Demo Win 11/10/8.1/8/7/XP
Secure Download

What to do before cloning

If you want to complete hard drive transfer to SSD drive on laptop, please do the following preparations before executing the process:

You need to prepare a SATA to USB adapter in advance to connect the SSD to the laptop, or use a small screwdriver to install the SSD into the laptop (non-professionals are best not to take this method).

sata to usb adapter

The space of the SSD must be larger than the used space of the laptop hard drive, or this hard drive cannot be transferred to SSD.
If it’s a new SSD, you should initialize this SSD first, or it can’t be found in the laptop.
Make sure the partition style must be compatible with the boot mode (Legacy and UEFI) In order to avoid changing boot mode after cloning, if the partition styles of the laptop hard drive and SSD are different, please convert MBR to GPT or GPT to MBR.
Please make sure the power of your computer is sufficient, because once the power is cut off, the migration will fail.

How to transfer laptop hard drive to SSD

When all preparations have been done, you can follow the steps below to migrate hard drive to SSD:

Step 1. Install and open AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. Click "Clone" and "Clone Disk".

disk clone wizard

Step 2. "Clone Disk Quickly" and "Sector-by-Sector Clone" are listed. Here, we choose "Clone Disk Quickly". 

clone disk quickly

Step 3. Select the laptop hard drive as the source drive.

select hard drive

Step 4. Choose the SSD as the destination drive and tick "Optimize the performance of SSD".

optimize the performance of ssd

Step 5. Change partition sizes of this SSD if you need or simply ignore it.

change size

Step 6. Click "Apply" and "Proceed" to operate the migration.

apply

Tip: If the laptop can only install one hard drive, you just need to restart the computer to use it; but if the computer supports to installing more than one disk, you can boot from SSD after changing boot drive.

To sum up

In conclusion, with the help of AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, you can safely transfer laptop hard drive to SSD. Besides, it can also help you allocate free space, move application from one partition to another, etc. If you want to transfer hard drive to SSD in Windows Server, please turn to the Server Version.

Tina
Tina · Staff Editor
Tina is an English editor of AOMEI Technology. She has a positive attitude and full of energy. On her work, she always keeps thinking to figure out the solutions for users' problems, and writes the answers so that can help someone. In her daily life, she likes to sing, watch TV and sleep. She always being grateful and happy to all the things happened and all the people encountered.