How to Clone NVMe SSD to NVMe SSD in Windows 10, 11 (2 Ways)

Quick Navigation:

• Case: how do I clone NVMe to NVMe?
• Why clone NVMe to NVMe?
• What do you need in NVMe to NVMe clone?
• How to clone NVMe SSD to NVMe SSD without reinstalling
• FAQ: How do I make a cloned SSD bootable?
• Verdict

Case: how do I clone NVMe to NVMe?

Anyone who wants to clone NVMe to another NVMe may have similar confusion - what's the simplest way to do it? NVMe swap can be too much trouble, especially for users who clone NVMe SSD with only one slot on the laptop. Think about it, if you use a SATA to USB adapter, the new NVMe disk can only be connected internally, and you need to use another SATA external disk as a transit. 

Luckily, with the method introduced in following sections, you can directly clone NVMe to NVMe with an M.2 to PCIe adapter and reliable hard drive cloning software. AOMEI Backupper Professional is a great one.

Why clone NVMe to NVMe?

Before taking action, let's go through some basic information about NVMe and determine whether to copy NVMe to NVMe.  

First of all, what is NVMe SSD? Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe), operating across the PCle bus, is a communication protocol developed especially for SSDs by a consortium of vendors including Intel, Samsung, SanDisk, Dell, and Seagate. It is a host controller interface for connecting SSDs. 

Second, why clone NVMe SSD to NVMe SSD? In recent years, many users would like to replace a hard drive with an NVMe SSD. What are the reasons? You probably won't know exactly unless you've used NVMe SSD on your computer. The most outstanding feature of NVMe SSDs is high performance and low latency, i.e. really fast. Below are  the 2 main reasons:

1. Gain greater storage. Generally speaking, NVMe SSDs do not come with high capacity, the first batch of produced SSDs in particular. More and more files, documents, projects, games, and applications need to be installed. As a result, upgrading smaller NVMe SSD to larger NVMe SSD for more space becomes an unavoidable trend.

2. Back up valuable files or transfer data from NVMe to NVMe. From another perspective of view, NVMe SSD clone is a good way to safeguard important data and operating systems, and a fast way to transfer files.

What do you need in NVMe to NVMe clone?

In general, cloning HDD to NVMe SSD requires you to meet following conditions for secure boot:

● Newer computer hardware (it is better to have Skylake chipsets or later even if NVMe is compatible with old computers) 
● An M.2 PCI-E x4 slot
● UEFI firmware & UEFI boot mode

However, if you have already run operating system on NVMe SSD, those pre-conditions can be omitted. All you need to pay attention to is following two aspects:

● The NVMe M.2 slot. If there is only one NVMe M.2 slot, you have two choices in SSD migration: use an M.2 to PCle adapter to connect NVMe SSD or clone it, or backup NVMe SSD and then restore to larger NVMe SSD. The second one still requires a backup drive to store image temporarily. 
● The NVMe SSD cloning software. The software should be an all-around tool that offers features for your different cloning plans.

Fortunately, AOMEI Backupper Professional is such an NVMe cloning software that combines disk clone and disk image features.

• You can transfer everything from one hard drive to another directly via the Disk Clone feature.
• You can also create a disk image of the source disk using the Disk Backup feature and then restore the image to the target disk.
• If the computer is not bootable, you can choose to create a bootable USB on another computer and then use it to clone NVMe SSD without booting into Windows. 

Free download AOMEI Backupper and have a try now. All Windows PC operating systems are supported, so you can clone Windows 10/11 to NVMe as well as Windows 8/8.1/7/XP/Vista. For migrating OS to NVMe SSD on Server systems, please refer to AOMEI Backupper Server edition (tutorials are the same).

How to clone NVMe SSD to NVMe SSD without reinstalling

Two ways of NVMe SSD data migration will be presented in the following paragraphs. The NVMe cloner - AOMEI Backupper Professional can help you with clone NVMe to NVMe in Samsung as well as SanDisk/Intel/WD NVMe data migration, etc.

• Method 1: Clone NVMe SSD to another NVMe SSD directly
• Method 2: Clone NVMe to larger NVMe with only one slot

Method 1: Clone NVMe SSD to another NVMe SSD directly 

Step 1. Connect the target NVMe SSD to your machine via M.2 to PCIe adapter and make sure it can be detected. Install and run AOMEI Backupper on your computer as well.

Step 2. Click on Clone and then Disk Clone to clone NVMe boot drive.

Step 3. Choose the source NVMe SSD and the target NVMe SSD. Be sure you’ve chosen the right disk, because the target disk will be overridden.

Step 4. Here comes the Operation Summary. Set up clone settings and click Start Clone to execute the NVMe clone process.

• Edit Partitions: To make full use of unallocated space left on the target disk. It's mainly used to clone disk to larger disk, regardless of HDD or SSD.

• SSD Alignment: To accelerate the writing and reading speed of SSD disk and improve its life span using 4K alignment technology.

• Sector by Sector clone: To clone all sectors of original disk to target drive with larger or the same disk space. Please note this feature can make "Edit Partitions" disappear.

Tips:
• To clone SSD to NVMe without booting operating system, it is suggested to create WinPE bootable media with AOMEI Backupper and do the cloning without Windows environment.
• To clone OS to NVMe SSD only, please use the System Clone feature.
• AOMEI Backupper Professional also allows you to clone hard drive in Command Prompt.

Method 2: Clone NVMe to larger NVMe with only one slot

If you want to clone NVMe SSD with only one slot and you don’t plan to purchase an M.2 adapter, you can complete the cloning without an adapter through another way.

Preparations to copy NVMe to NVMe:

• A USB drive greater than 8GB in size to be used to create bootable media.

• An external storage device, NAS, or network shared folder to store backup image.

• Patience.

The overall steps are:

• Backup NVMe SSD and save the image to external hard drive, or flash drive, NAS, shared folder, or anywhere you can access within WinPE mode in the first place.
• Create a bootable USB to start the computer after switching NVMe drives. 
• Then, replace old NVMe SSD with the target empty NVMe SSD manually.
• Finally, boot computer from bootable USB created by this software and restore the backup image to the newly installed NVMe SSD. Here come the detailed steps to clone NVMe drive to larger NVMe.

Without further ado, let's start to clone NVMe SSD with only one slot. 

Step 1. Run AOMEI Backupper Professional on your computer. Connect the external drive if any.

Step 2. Click on Backup and then Disk Backup. Follow the wizard to create a disk backup by choosing source NVMe SSD, external storage, and starting to backup it successively.

Step 3. Remove the external storage (if any) after the backup process completes. Plug in the USB drive and run AOMEI Backupper again.

Step 4. Click on Tools > Create Bootable Media. Complete the creation with on-screen wizard. It is suggested to choose WinPE mode.

Step 5. Shut down your computer and remove USB drive after that. Replace the original NVMe SSD with the new NVMe SSD manually.

Step 6. Insert the bootable USB drive again. Boot from the USB drive and access AOMEI Backupper into WinPE mode. Connect the external drive that contains your backup image to your computer (if any).

Step 7. Click on Restore tab and select the disk backup image. Follow the guide to do NVMe recovery and make sure you’ve checked SSD Alignments for SSD before restoring. Wait patiently.

Step 8. Eject the bootable media after restoring successfully, and then boot your computer from the new NVMe SSD.

Tips:
• To restore system to dissimilar hardware (i.e. restore image to new computer), please tick "Universal Restore" before clicking "Start Restore". This option is available in both disk restore and system restore.
• In the advanced edition, you still can deploy images to multiple computers, even with dissimilar hardware.  Switch to Tools and select "AOMEI Image Deploy" for image deployment.

FAQ: How do I make a cloned SSD bootable?

Normally your computer should boot up properly after cloning NVMe to NVMe. However, if you failed to boot from the cloned SSD, we also collect some possible causes:

1. The source disk has bad sectors.

2. The OS corrupted during cloning.

3. Missing cloning boot related drives like system reserved partition.

4. Set wrong drive to boot.

5. MBR & GPT conflict.

For more information about this question, please turn to cloned drive won’t boot in Windows.

Verdict

That’s all for how to clone NVMe to NVMe in Windows 11, 10, 8, 7, XP, Vista. Follow one of them according to your situation. If you are tired of cloning from NVMe to external disk and then to NVMe, you'd better use M.2 to PCIe adapter instead of SATA to USB adapter. The latter can only connect SATA drives. Other than NVMe SSD cloning, AOMEI Backupper can also be used as IDE to IDE hard drive duplicator. Download freely and give it a shot.  

For IT technicians, you could use AOMEI Backupper Technician or Technician Plus, which allows you to create portable version of this software and directly run off a USB flash drive without reinstalling. Then, you can clone, backup & restore, sync or use tools in this software.