How to Migrate Windows 10 to New Hard Drive for Free

Why migrate Windows 10 to new hard drive?

If you are struggling to open large files on your system or run various applications at the same time, and the Windows 10 operating system reads too slowly, it is a great choice to upgrade your computer from old hard drive to a new hard drive. This can be the most effective way to speed up your Windows 10 computer.

However, changing a new disk without OS installed will cost you lots of time and effort to reinstall everything from scratch, so you might wish to directly migrate Windows 10 from the old hard drive to the new one. Then, you don’t need to install the system after the migration, and you can start your computer directly from the new disk too.

Migrate Windows 10 to new SSD or HDD?

After deciding to transfer Windows 10 to new hard drive, now it is time to make a choice between SSD and HDD. Which of the two is the better choice? There’s no straightforward answer to this question. Each buyer has different needs, and you have to evaluate the decision based on your own requirements, budget, and preferences. Here we would like to introduce the difference between SSD and HDD to help with your decision.

▶ SSD-Solid State Drive: A kind of hard disk which is made by solid-state electronic storage chip and consists of the control unit (flash chip) and stipulation of interface, in function and usage and in appearance and size.

▶ HDD-Hard Disk Drive: It is the most basic computer storage, made up of magnetic tape with mechanical parts inside. They are larger and prone to damage.

Attribute	SSD(Solid State Drive)	HDD(Hard Disk Drive)
Power Draw/Battery Life	Less power draw, averages 2 – 3 watts, resulting in 30+ minute battery boost	More power draw, averages 6 – 7 watts and therefore uses more battery
Cost	Expensive, roughly $0.50 per gigabyte (based on buying a 1TB drive)	Only around $0.15 per gigabyte, very cheap (buying a 4TB model)
Capacity	Typically not larger than 512GB for notebook size drives; 1TB max for desktops	Typically around 500GB and 2TB maximum for notebook size drives; 4TB max for desktops
Operating System Boot Time	Around 22 seconds average bootup time	Around 40 seconds average bootup time
Noise	There are no moving parts and as such no sound	Audible clicks and spinning can be heard
vibration	No vibration as there are no moving parts	The spinning of the platters can sometimes result in vibration
Heat Produced	Lower power draw and no moving parts so little heat is produced	HDD doesn’t produce much heat, but it will have a measurable amount more heat than an SSD due to moving parts and higher power draw
File Copy / Write Speed	Generally above 200 MB/s and up to 550 MB/s for cutting edge drives	The range can be anywhere from 50 – 120MB / s
File Opening Speed	Up to 30% faster than HDD	Slower than SSD
Magnetism Affected?	An SSD is safe from any effects of magnetism	Magnets can erase data
Scope of application	Applicable to indoor, no change in temperature, no shock and vibration equipment. It is widely used in military, IT industry,aviation and many other fields.	Applicable to outdoor, low temperature, high temperature, shipborne, automotive, airborne products, firewalls, robots, portable devices, military, etc. It is suitable for home use.

Now, you should have a better understanding of those two disks. Whatever hard drive you choose to contain the Windows 10 from the old hard drive, you will also need a professional OS migration tool.

Step-by-step: Migrate Windows 10 to new hard drive for free

Here, we bring the freeware - AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. It comes with “Disk Clone Wizard”, which allows you to clone Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows 8 and Windows 7 partition to new hard drive (SSD or HDD) and boot from the new hard drive successfully after migration. 

★Preparations:

Connect the new hard drive (HDD/SSD) to the computer in a proper way and ensure it is detected successfully.

Make sure there is a piece of unallocated space that can hold the Windows operating system partition on the source disk. 

Std Version support to clone OS from MBR to MBR. If you want to clone Windows 10 from GTP disk to MBR disk, or MBR to GPT, GPT to GPT disk, you can upgrade to AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. Besides, you have to ensure your motherboard supports UEFI/EFI boot mode since you have to upgrade Legacy to UEFI after migrating OS from MBR to GPT.

 Step 1. Download and install AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. Then, run it and click All Tools -> Disk Clone Wizard in the left pane.

Step 2. Choose a clone method in this window. Generally, we recommend the Clone Disk Quickly and click Next.

Step 3. Choose the old hard drive as the source drive in this step and click Next.

Step 4. And choose new hard drive as the destination drive. If the destination hard drive is SSD, you can check“Optimize the performance of SSD” and click Next.

Step 5. In the Edit Disk window, you can resize the partition to fit the new disk and click Next.

Step 6. Finally, click Apply to submit the operations.

Follow these simple steps and you can migrate Windows 10 to new hard drive free and easily. Then you can restart your PC, enter BIOS, change the boot order to make the new disk as the first boot device to check if you are able to boot computer from the new hard drive smoothly.

Summary

This is how to migrate Windows 10 to new hard drive for free. Besides the OS migration function, AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard also enables PC users to clone partition, convert MBR and GPT without deleting partitions, merge partition, move partition, convert FAT32 and NTFS without formatting, and more. For Windows Server users, the AOMEI Partition Assistant Server is a nice choice.