How to Clone HDD to M.2 SSD with Ease on Windows 11, 10, 8, 7

Scenario

What is M.2 SSD?

Recently, lots of people posted a question that how to clone a hard disk to M.2 SSD on many forums. So what is M.2 SSD?

M.2 SSD is a new generation of solid state drive (SSD). It is much faster than a regular SSD. An M.2 SSD with NVMe protocol directly connect with motherboard giving a much faster speed to transfer data, which can reach to 3500 MB/S, while other SSD deliver read/write speed of between 200 MB/s to 550 MB/s. But it is worth mentioning that the performance of a AHCI M.2 SSD is the same with that of SATA SSD.

Besides, M.2 SSDs are much smaller than normal SATA SSDs. They are the size of a chewing gum without a shell making it easy to be placed inside a PC case, even a laptop that does not have room for a regular SSD.

Now, we can draw a conclusion that the better performance and smaller size are the 2 most important reason why people want to transfer data to M.2 SSD. Next, we will demonstrate you how to clone HDD to M.2 SSD with ease.

Choose a correct version of M.2 SSD

Before rushing to buy an M.2 SSD, you need to know what M.2 SSD interface your computer supports. Look for a slot about one inch on your motherboard. Usually, it is labeled with SATA or PCIe or SATA/PCIe. Pay attention to the label, because you need to buy a matching M.2 SSD. If you don’t see the slot, you need to buy a corresponding adapter.

If you have already had an M.2 SSD, but you don’t know which type you have. You can look at the notches on the connector. A PCIe M.2 SSD has only one notch, while a SATA M.2 SSD has two notches on the connector.

And then, unscrew the M.2 slot and carefully insert your M.2 SSD into the motherboard. In some situations, SSD won’t show up on the computer, you need to fix it manually.

Choose a proper M.2 (NVMe) SSD cloner

If you just bought a new M.2 NVMe SSD drive, you might be wondering how to transfer data from the old disk to the new SSD. In fact, you can try excellent M.2 SSD cloning software - AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. This is one of the best ways to clone HDD to M.2 SSD on the market, because it allows you to migrate all data and applications to your SSD easily and effectively with its amazing features.

▶ It supports to copy a large disk to smaller one thanks to its “Copy Disk Quickly”. As long as the available space on the destination disk is not smaller than the used space of the source disk.

▶ It supports different Windows operating systems. Whether your operating system is Windows 11/10/8/7, Vista or XP, you can clone disk successfully.

▶ It assists you in copying only one partition to SSD/HDD. If there is only one partition you want to clone, it will save your energy to delete other partitions you don’t need.

▶ This cloner enables you to boot from the destination disk after cloning the operating system to it. It will migrate all partitions that are important for system boot up.

▶ AOMEI Partition Assistant supports 4K alignment that can increase the reading and writing speed of data, the performance of your computer will be improved.

Step-by-step: How to clone HDD to M.2 SSD on Windows 11/10/8/7

Connect the M.2 SSD to your computer, install and launch the AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. You can click the following button to download a demo version to have a try.

✍ Attentions:
● The data on the target disk will be deleted after cloning, please make a backup of them with AOMEI Backupper beforehand.
● If you are planning to clone MBR system disk to the NVMe M.2 SSD drive, which needs to be of GPT partition table when it is used as a bootable disk, you need to make sure your motherboard should support UEFI boot mode, since you have to change BIOS to UEFI after clone.

Step 1.Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant, click the "Clone" main tab and select "Clone Disk". (You can also right-click the Disk you want to clone and select the "Clone Disk" tool to run disk clone.)

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 put the data of the source disk on, and then click "Next".

Step 4. Then, you will enter the Confirm interface where you can check the source and destination disk. After all is set, you can click the "Confirm" button to continue.

In lower left corner of the window, you can click the "Settings" button to adjust the partition size on the destination disk. There are three options for you:

• Clone without resizing partitions: all partitions will be cloned to the target disk as the original partition size. It is available when the target disk is larger than the source disk. If it is smaller, this option will be grayed out.
• Fit partitions to entire disk: all partitions will be cloned to the target disk and take up its full capacity according to the original partition size proportion.
• Edit partitions on this disk: you can change every partition size on the target disk as you need.

After finishing the adjustment, please click "Save".

Notes:

• You can tick "4k alignment" to improve the reading and writing speed of SSD if the selected destination disk is an SSD storage.
• All data on this selected destination disk will be wiped out after you save the operation to physical disk. If there is important data on the destination drive, please make a backup in advance.
• If you clone to a smaller SSD, the first option is grayed out. If you select Sector-by-Sector Clone, it is unable to adjust the size on the destination disk.

Step 5. You can preview the disk cloning operating by viewing the "Pending Operations". To commit the "Pending Operations", please click "Apply" and "Proceed".

Step 6. The cloning process will start and you can check the cloning process.

Additional: Clone Windows OS to M.2 SSD

If you only want to clone Windows system partition to an M.2 SSD, AOMEI Partition Assistant also support. Open AOMEI Partition Assistant, click "Migrate OS to SSD" in the main interface. And the rest of the steps resemble with cloning the whole disk, choosing destination disk, choose clone method. And don't forget to click “Clone” on in the top toolbar, and choose “Migrate OS”.

Boot from the cloned M.2 SSD

Follow the above steps, and restart your computer to set the cloned M.2 SSD as the boot drive.

Step 1. During the process of restarting, long press “F2” to “Enter Setup”.

Step 2. And choose “Change boot order” then set the cloned M.2 SSD as boot drive.

Step 3. Press "Enter". Now you can boot the computer from the SSD successfully.

If you want to replace your old HDD with M.2 SSD, or your computer can only put one hard drive, disconnect your HDD from the computer and plug in M.2 SSD right where it used to be. The system will boot directly on your new SSD.

Conclusion

This is how to clone HDD to M.2 SSD on Windows 11, 10, 8, 7. In order to boot from the destination NVMe M.2 SSD successfully, please change the BIOS boot mode to UEFI if the source system disk is of MBR.

By the way, after the cloning finish, if you find your cloned M.2 SSD won’t boot, you can refer to this link to fix it. In addition, If you are running with Windows Server OS, there are Server Edition for you.