40% OFF Partition Wizard & ShadowMaker (Limited time offer) MiniTool Partition Wizard Pro. 1 PC license/Annual Subscription. MiniTool ShadowMaker Pro Ultimate. 3 PC license/1-Year upgrade. $59.00 + $158.00 = $217.00 $130.20 (save $86.80) Get Now $82.80. MiniTool Partition Wizard is ranked 1st while EaseUS Partition Master is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose MiniTool Partition Wizard is: The free version can clone Windows system disks, allowing to clone an old harddisk to a newer SSD. MiniTool Partition Wizard, the most direct and effective tool, could help you clone Windows 10 to SSD in a simple way. In addition, when we need to install operating system and programs on many computers, we may choose to clone hard drive to SSD.

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Summary :

Don't know how to clone a hard drive to SSD without any data loss in Windows 10/8/7? Use MiniTool ShadowMaker and MiniTool Partition Wizard, the best disk cloning software, to easily clone a hard drive and create a bootable Windows 10/8/7 clone.

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Why Clone a Hard Drive

Upgrade old hard drive
Expand a small hard drive
Make a backup
Improve disk performance

Why Need to Clone Hard Drive

1. Upgrade old hard drive:

Usually, after a few years of use, a hard drive's firmware will start being outdated and the disk drive itself will start to wear out. Replacing the old disk with a new one minimizes hard disk failures and maintains your computer at its best performance.

2. Expand a small hard drive:

When you run out of disk storage space on your hard drives, clone the data to a larger drive to use the extra disk space without any data loss. Or you can choose to clone a small USB drive to a larger one.

3. Make a backup:

The backup purposes are that data loss and corruption can happen anytime to any computer. To secure your data, use a backupper to back up your hard drive periodically and as frequently as possible.

4. Improve performance:

Solid-state drive provides outstanding merits such as fast read-write speed, low consumption, etc. Therefore, upgrading your HDD to SSD will significantly improve computing performance.

So, how long does it take to clone a hard drive? How do you clone a hard drive in Windows 10/8/7? Keep reading to find the best way to clone a hard drive to SSD or a new hard drive easily.

How Long Does It Take to Clone a Hard Drive Windows 7/8/10

For this question, there are three main factors.

To estimate the time to clone your hard drive, the single most critical factor is to know how much data is on the disk that will be cloned. The more data, the longer it takes.

Additionally, determining the method used to clone the drive is also critical.

For instance, cloning a disk to multiple systems needs two steps: you need to clone the original disk to a data repository (saved as an image file) and it will be cloned to the bare disk from there.
If you clone a hard drive in Windows 7/8/10 for a computer upgrade, you can directly clone the original drive to another disk like SSD in the same computer. This way doesn’t have an intermediate step.

The last factor is the hard drives’ type. And sometimes, you also should consider the specifications of the system. The speed of the older disk could be the determining factor during a direct drive-to-drive transfer if you use an older drive technology to clone to a newer one.

In conclusion, the time to clone a hard drive to SSD is based on your actual situation and it couldn’t easily be estimated. In the following sections, we will show you how to clone a hard drive in Windows 7/8/10 to SSD with two different drive cloning tools in the same computer effectively.

How to Clone a Hard Drive with ShadowMaker

Connect the disk you want to clone to computer
Start the disk cloning software - ShadowMaker
Select the source and destination disk
Start the disk upgrading process

Clone Hard Drive Software – MiniTool ShadowMaker

You may ask: how do I clone my hard drive to a new one? As a matter of fact, cloning a disk is easy with a piece of disk clone software.

MiniTool ShadowMaker is the best free disk cloning program developed by MiniTool Software Ltd. to help clone a hard drive Windows 7/8/10.

It is also a piece of backup software, providing disk backup solutions including file backup and restore, partitioning, and most importantly, cloning. It can even clone a system drive to make a bootable Windows 10/8/7 OS. We highly recommend this safe and free solution for cloning disk. It also enables you to back up files to the network drive. With the backup image file, it allows you to perform the disaster recovery to restore your personal files.

Now, we will show you the full steps of cloning a hard drive.

Download a free MiniTool ShadowMaker Trial Edition for 30-day.

Further reading:

Before you start, connect a hard disk, for example, SSD or an external drive or an USB external drive, to your computer.

What if my SSD has a smaller hard drive space than my HDD? Can I clone a large capacity HDD to a smaller capacity SSD?

Yes! As long as the actual used hard drive space on your original hard drive (HDD) is less than or equal to the available storage space in your target drive (SDD), MiniTool ShadowMaker can clone your larger hard drive to smaller SSD. However, if the source disk uses more space than what is available in the target drive, it is not possible to clone all the content onto the target drive.

Now it is time to clone a hard drive. How to clone hard drive to SSD free in Windows 10/8/7, or how to clone a laptop hard drive? Follow the below step by step gudie.

Step 1: Connect to the Disk You Want to Clone

Double-click MiniTool ShadowMaker to run it.
To select whether you want to connect to a Local or a Remote disk, click the Connect button under the desired destination. For this example, we will choose Local.

Tip: From the main interface, you know MiniTool ShadowMaker is a piece of dedicated backup software. And you probably ask: How to clone a hard drive to SSD or an external hard drive?

Step 2: Start the Clone Disk Tool

On the main User Interface, go to Tools page.
Click the Clone Disk feature.

Step 3: Select Source Drive and Target Disks

Select your source- the old disk you want to clone.
Select your target- the new disk (SSD) you want to clone to.
Click the OK button to start the process.

Tip: You can use MiniTool ShadowMaker to clone a bootable hard drive in Windows 10/8/7. That is, if you clone a system disk to SSD, the SSD will be bootable after cloning as long as you set it as the first boot order in BIOS.

Warning: During the cloning process, all data on the destination disk will be destroyed. After you have made sure nothing important is on the it, click Yes to continue.

Step 4: The Hard Drive Cloning Process

1. Wait for a few minutes for MiniTool ShadowMaker to perform the hard drive clone process. The cloning time is in proportional to the disk size.

2. After the process is 100% completed successfully, a pop-up window will ask you whether you want to shut down your computer now.

You can choose to shut down at a later time.
If you choose to shut down now, make sure you only connect ONE of your source or destination drive before you boot the computer the first time after the clone.
If more than one disk is connected to the computer at boot time, one disk may be marked as offline by the Windows operating system.
Only connect the disk you want to use at the moment.

As mentioned in this part, in most situations, you choose to clone a hard drive to SSD in Windows 10/8/7 rather than simply copying & pasting for disk upgrades, good performance, and disk backup. Due to different cloning needs, the specific operations are different.

① If you want to use and boot the operating system from the destination drive, you can mark the target one online by either:

Shutting down your comput

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