How Do You Move Windows to a New SSD?

Sourced from real discussions on r/buildapc and r/techsupport, cross-checked against live PricePerGig listings.

Reinstalling Windows is painful, having to not only copy your documents over but every application you’ve ever installed, even the one you only use a few times a year and you’ve totally forgotten where the installer is, or even if the company is still around to download it again from. You can ‘clone’ or ‘copy’ Windows to a new drive. It is fraught with danger; read on for how. My biggest tip right here right now, if you plan to clone Windows: whatever you do, ensure you buy a DIFFERENT and LARGER size. Read on to find why.

The table above shows live SSD prices on your marketplace, so grab a cheap, roomy drive to move to before you start.

Cloning versus a clean install

Two ways to do this, and both are valid.

• Cloning copies everything across, so Windows, programs and files all carry over. Least hassle.
• A clean install wipes the slate, which can feel snappier but means reinstalling everything.

For most people, cloning is the easy win. You are reading this because you do not want to reinstall, so cloning it is.

What you need first

Gather these and the job is painless.

• Your new SSD, at least as big as the used space on the old drive. Bigger is better and cheap per TB.
• A way to connect both drives at once. A spare M.2 slot, a SATA port, or a cheap USB to drive adapter.
• Cloning software. Many SSD brands bundle it free (Samsung Data Migration for Samsung drives, or the Acronis-based tools that ship with Crucial and WD drives), or use a trusted free tool like Clonezilla or AOMEI Backupper Standard. Rescuezilla is a friendlier graphical front end for Clonezilla if the command line puts you off.
• A backup of anything irreplaceable, just in case. Always.

The cloning steps

Here is the whole process, start to finish.

1. Connect the new SSD alongside the old one.
2. Open your cloning software and pick the old drive as the source.
3. Pick the new SSD as the destination. Double check this, because it gets wiped.
4. Start the clone and let it run. Big drives take a while, so be patient.
5. When it finishes, shut down and, if you can, make the new SSD the boot drive.
6. Boot up. If Windows loads as normal, you are done.

That is genuinely it. No reinstalling, no re activating, no rebuilding your setup.

This is your top tip of the day. When you are doing the clone in the included software, you will be expected to know a pretty large string of digits and text to tell which one was the old drive and which is the new drive. This is hard, and people DO get confused. The simplest way to know, for a fact, which is the old drive and which is the new drive is the size: the new one is the large one. That is exactly why you buy a DIFFERENT and LARGER drive. I know many people have cloned the wrong way around, and yes, the software will let you, and yes, you lose everything, not just some of your files, not just some of the settings and games, all of them.

After the clone

A couple of tidy up jobs.

• Set the new SSD as the first boot device in your BIOS if it did not happen automatically.
• Once you have confirmed everything works, you can wipe the old drive and reuse it as extra storage.
• Enjoy the free space if you sized up, which you should have.

The bottom line

Moving Windows to a new SSD is a clone job, not a reinstall. Connect both drives, clone old to new, set the new one as the boot drive, and carry on exactly as before.

Grab a good value SSD from the live table above, ideally a size bigger than your old one, and keep a backup before you start just in case something hiccups. Then enjoy the speed and the space.

Remember, buy a bigger drive than what you have to make the clone process simple, and for Windows you need an SSD that’s either SATA or NVMe.

← Back to the SSDs hub