How to Clone Hard Drive to SanDisk SSD in Windows 7/8/10?

By AOMEI / Last Updated February 4, 2020

About SanDisk SSD

To begin, solid state drive (SSD) is designed for faster speed and better properties so that many users want to replace their old hard drive to an SSD. With the SSD, the boot time will be shortened, and the computer performance will be enhanced. Among all brand SSDs, SanDisk SSD is popular due to its outstanding performance and strong compatibility with Windows OS.

A lot of users want to change their HDD to a SanDisk SSD. However, replacing a storage device means to transfer operating system and applications. You can spend a long time installing them from scratch again. Or you can clone hard drive to SanDisk SSD so as to quickly get an exact copy. To achieve this, you just need professional SanDisk cloning software.

Does SanDisk SSD come with cloning software?

SanDisk SSD Notebook Upgrade Tool Kit comes with cloning software, which can transfer files, programs, and operating system from hard drive to SanDisk SSD. And it still offers you a fast USB 3.0 to SATA cable and step-by-step instructions. But there is an obvious disadvantages-it’s paid.

If you don’t mind, you can get it on the internet and then use it to clone hard drive. But if you mind, you could consider using a free SanDisk cloning software like AOMEI Backupper Standard.

The best free SanDisk cloning software

AOMEI Backupper Standard is the best tool for SanDisk to clone HDD to SSD. It’s free but professional. And it supports cloning not only disk but also partition to all kinds of storage devices including SanDisk SSD and other brand SSDs, USB drives, NAS, HDD, SSHD etc.

Next, I will say something you may care about:

Support all Windows edition. AOMEI Backupper can be used in Windows7/8/8.1/10/XP/Vista.
Make an exact copy of hard drive and ensure secure boot. Compared with fresh install, the “Clone” feature can avoid reinstalling system from scratch, installed programs and data loss.
Clone hard drive to SanDisk SSD regardless of disk size. That’s to say, in this software, you can clone hard disk between the same size, larger or smaller.
Extra features included. When cloning disk with the same size, you can use “Sector by sector clone” feature to clone all sectors of your old drive and transfer it to new SSD. Besides, you can maximize the SSDs performance with “SSD Alignment”.

Continue to see below and I’ll show you how to clone hard drive to SanDisk SSD later.

Steps to clone hard drive to SanDisk SSD

Before starting to clone HDD to SanDisk SSD, you need to connect SanDisk SSD using one of the following two methods:

Clone HDD to SSD via SATA to USB adapter: If your computer has only one drive bay, you need an SATA to USB adapter and this allows you to connect a drive to your PC externally by simply plugging it into the USB port.
Clone HDD to SSD without SATA to USB cable: If your computer has more than one drive bay, you can add the SSD as a secondary disk so to clone HDD to SSD without SATA to USB cable.

To clone hard drive to SanDisk SSD, use the following steps:

1. Download, install and launch AOMEI Backupper Standard.

Download Freeware

Win 10/8.1/8/7/XP

Secure Download

2. Select “Disk Clone” under clone tab. To clone only system partition, click “System Clone”

3. Select HDD (here is disk 0) as the source disk, and click “Next” to continue.

4. Select your SanDisk SSD (here is disk 1) as the destination disk to save disk copy. Click “Next”.

5. Select “Edit partitions”, “Sector by sector clone” or “SSD Alignment” according to your needs and click “Start Clone” to continue.

Tips: If you don’t know when and what features to use, now I will explain it for you in detail.

Edit partitions: This feature is commonly used when you clone disk to larger disk. By default, if you don’t adjust partition size of destination disk, there will be an unallocated space and you cannot use it. To make full use of it, you can change the disk size with this feature.
SSD Alignment: This feature is designed for SSDs and can accelerate its reading and writing speed.
Sector by sector clone: This feature is used to clone all sectors whether used or not and can keep data security to the greatest extent.

The first feature only supports on AOMEI Backupper Professional or other paid version. If you need to clone disk to a larger one, you could consider using the advanced version.

Wrapping things up

With AOMEI Backupper, you can easily to clone hard drive to SanDisk SSD. But it’s not a SanDisk SSD cloning software, but also other branded SSD cloning software, such as, OCZ SSD clone software, ADATA SSD clone software, and so on. And all features mentioned above can be applied to all SSDs.

Need to clone hard drive to SSD successfully without reinstalling, even for a smaller one? Download AOMEI Backupper and then follow the above steps to clone disk.