SSD upgrade: When cloning to a drive of lower capacity, make sure you copy to the C: partition and partitions on the left of it. In this case, you’ll only need to choose the primary (C:) partition plus those on its left, and uncheck the rest of the partitions. Note: If your target drive is of lesser capacity, you won’t be able to select all the partitions of the source drive. Under the drive that you want to clone (your existing drive), choose “Clone this disk…”, then click on “Select a disk to clone too…” and select the replacement drive (the new drive). Macrium Reflect is quite self-explanatory.Ģ. Run the software it will take a few seconds to scan your computer and then display the list of available drives. Download and install Macrium Reflect, then plug the replacement drive into the computer using the adapter, or via a secondary internal desktop connector. You should use it instead of your new SSD’s bundled software if there’s any.ġ. And since it doesn’t cost anything, there’s no reason you shouldn’t use it. I recommend Macrium Reflect for home users, which is by far the best cloning/backup software, in my opinion. SSD upgrade: Drive cloning on a Windows computer In this post, I’ll recommend two free applications that work very well. (If you use a desktop, you can use another internal connector instead). An adapter to connect the replacement drive into a computer, such as a SATA-to-USB adapter.Also, if you can afford it, a high-capacity drive is always better than a lower-capacity one. However, for best performance - especially with SSDs - the primary (boot) drive of a computer needs 30 percent or more of free space. For example, if you have a 1TB hard drive with 100GB of data on it, you can clone it to a 120GB SSD without any problem. A replacement (target) drive: This drive needs to have a larger capacity than the amount of data already on the original (source) drive.

No matter if you use a Windows or a Mac computer, you will need three things for the job. A SATA-to-USB adapter will come in handy when you need to clone the internal drive of a computer. You can also listen to it a hard drive spins and makes mechanical sounds. If you have an aging machine, this is a sure way to make it run much better than when it was new and extend its life significantly.īy the way, if your computer takes longer than 40 seconds to boot up or a few seconds to launch an application, it likely runs on a hard drive.

I’d recommend doing this on any HDD-based computer, new or old, running Mac OS or Windows. SSD upgrade: Drive cloning on a Windows computer.

Macrium clone to larger drive