How to clone a hard drive Windows 10? 

Why should you clone your hard drive?

The process of hard drive cloning offers several advantages, providing an efficient means to optimize your storage solutions. Cloning facilitates the creation of an exact replica of your hard drive, proving valuable for tasks such as data backup and transfer. Notably, it extends its utility by enabling the replication of your Windows 10 installation alongside your personalized preferences and configurations.

Enhancing Storage Space When Upgrading Your Hard Drive

When confronted with limited storage space, a compelling reason to upgrade your hard drive emerges. In such a scenario, cloning your existing hard drive onto a new one presents a strategic solution. This intelligent move enables you to amplify your PC’s storage capacity while retaining all your previous files intact.

Elevating PC Performance

The performance of a PC holds paramount importance for every user, with heightened significance for those who push the capabilities of their systems to the limits. This subset includes gamers, video editors, engineers, and other creative professionals. If you prioritize swiftness and efficacy, the adoption of a solid-state drive (SSD) is likely on your agenda. Alternatively, you might contemplate swapping your existing SSD for one boasting greater storage capacity. In either scenario, duplicating your original hard drive onto the new unit offers a seamless strategy for preserving all your data.

What to do before cloning your hard drive?

Before embarking on the creation of your clone drive, there are several pivotal steps that warrant your attention:

Back Up Crucial Data in advance

Begin by safeguarding any particularly vital data on the disk, which you intend to clone. This step holds immense significance since the cloning process will overwrite all data on your original hard drive. This precaution becomes indispensable to avert potential losses in case of unforeseen complications.

Assess Storage on the Destination Hard Drive

It’s imperative to ascertain that the hard drive intended for cloning possesses sufficient storage capacity to accommodate your entire dataset. Space-related challenges can readily arise, especially when transitioning from a hard disk drive (HDD) to a solid-state drive (SSD). To illustrate, if your initial HDD boasts 1TB of space, ensure that your new SSD is equipped to handle this volume.

Readiness for Device Access

Prepare to gain access to your device by having a screwdriver at the ready. This tool proves essential for opening your desktop and subsequently swapping out the hard drive post-cloning. Vigilance is paramount in confirming that the new hard drive is properly connected within your desktop PC setup.

How to clone a hard drive?

How to clone hard drive? Since there’s no built-in disk cloning software in Windows, if you decide to clone your hard drive, you should select third-party cloning software, for example, AOMEI Backupper. This software is not only a powerful backup and restore tool, but also offers effective cloning utilities, which is compatible with Windows 11,10, 8, 8.1, 7, XP, and Vista. For server users, please refer to its Server edition.

• Intelligent clone: this software offers effective intelligent cloning utilities, so that you can only clone the used sectors from the original drive while bypassing the bad sectors.
• Resourceful function: it is a full-featured software that offers powerful backup and restore functions, cloning, and sync utilities as well.

You can download this software and install it on your PC, I can show you how to clone your hard drive with this software effectively.

Step 1. Click Clone and then choose Disk Clone.

Caution: If you want to clone the system disk, please upgrade this software into professional version.

Step 2. Choose the hard drive on Windows 10 that you want to clone and click Next.

Step 3. After choosing the source disk, you need to choose the destination path to save this disk. And then click on the Next button.

Step 4. Then click Start Clone to start.

Cloning a hard drive on Windows 10 is not difficult. The most important thing is that you should choose well-functioning cloning software since there are no built-in cloning utilities or official cloning software of Windows 10 that has been launched. AOMEI Backupper standard is the most suitable and best free cloning software that offers to you. You can use this software to execute hard drive cloning tasks any time you want.