Buying the SSD is the easy part. The bit that stops people is everything already on the old drive: Windows, the programs, the saved games, the photos folder nobody has ever tidied. Reinstalling all of it is a weekend you would rather not spend. Cloning copies the whole drive across, so the new SSD boots exactly like the old one and you carry on where you left off. It is genuinely straightforward, but a few of the guides you will find are quietly out of date, and one or two of the steps they skip are the ones that cause the horror stories. Here is the current version.
Cloning brings everything, and that includes the things you would rather leave behind. If your Windows install is several years old, has been upgraded in place a few times, and takes two minutes to reach the desktop, a clone will faithfully reproduce all of that on hardware that deserves better.
A clean install of Windows onto the new SSD, with your files copied back afterwards, will usually feel noticeably crisper. It costs you an evening of reinstalling programs and hunting for licence keys.
Clone if your system is healthy and the software on it would be painful to reinstall. Start fresh if the machine has been misbehaving anyway, or if the install is old enough that you cannot remember setting it up.
Search for cloning software and a great many results, including recent-looking ones, will tell you to download Macrium Reflect Free. For years that was the standard answer.
Checking Macrium's own cloning page in August 2026, there is no free edition listed. The button offers a free trial, and every product under "what can I use to clone" points at Buy Now: Home, Business, Technician. The free tier that all those guides recommend is not there to download.
Macrium is still good software, and if you are happy to pay for a licence it remains a solid choice. The problem is only that a lot of guides send you to a page expecting a free download and you arrive at a purchase.
Worth knowing before you follow a tutorial that was written in 2021 and lightly refreshed since.
This is the answer most people miss, and it is the best one. Most of the major drive manufacturers bundle a licensed cloning tool, free, on the condition that one of their drives is involved in the clone.
The usual pattern: Crucial and Western Digital, including SanDisk, have both shipped versions of Acronis licensed for their own drives; Seagate has offered DiscWizard; Samsung has provided its own migration tool. The exact names and availability shift over time, so check the support pages for the specific drive you have bought rather than trusting a list, this one included. I have not re-verified each of these today.
The practical point stands regardless: before you download anything, look at what the maker of your new SSD gives you. It is free, it is designed for exactly this job, and it will not ask for a card.
If you have not settled on a drive yet, this is worth weighing alongside price and speed. Our SSD deals page tracks what the major brands are actually going for in the UK right now.
Clonezilla is free, open source and has been doing this reliably for years. It boots from a USB stick and works entirely outside Windows, which sidesteps a whole class of problems with cloning a drive that is currently running.
It looks like a piece of software from 1998 and it will not hold your hand. If that puts you off, Rescuezilla is a friendlier front-end for the same engine.
Windows has no proper built-in disk cloning tool. File History and the various backup options copy files, and the old system image feature is not a clone in the sense you want here. If a guide implies you can do this with what is already on the machine, it is stretching things.
While a clone runs, you have one copy of your data and a process actively writing to another disk. If something goes wrong at the wrong moment, you can lose both.
Copy anything irreplaceable somewhere else first. Photos, documents, anything that only exists on that machine. An external drive or a cloud folder is fine. This takes ten minutes and it is the difference between an annoying afternoon and a genuinely bad one.
This one catches people out badly. If your drive is encrypted with BitLocker, which many Windows 11 machines are by default without the owner ever choosing it, cloning can leave you facing a recovery key prompt on first boot with no way past it.
Check whether BitLocker is on. If it is, either suspend it before cloning, or make absolutely certain you have the recovery key saved somewhere that is not on the drive you are about to clone. It is usually held in your Microsoft account.
Being locked out of your own newly cloned SSD because the key was only stored on the old drive is a miserable way to spend an evening.
You can clone a large hard drive onto a smaller SSD, but only if the data currently on it fits in the new space, with room to spare. A 2TB drive with 300GB used will clone happily onto a 500GB SSD. The same drive with 800GB used will not.
If you are tight, this is the moment to empty the downloads folder, uninstall the games you have not played since 2023 and clear the recycle bin. Some tools will resize partitions for you; giving them less work to do makes the clone quicker and less likely to complain.
If you are close to the limit, it is worth checking whether sizing up costs as much as you assume. Current 1TB SSD prices are a long way from where they were a couple of years ago, and cloning once into a drive you will not outgrow beats doing this again in eighteen months.
Older systems use MBR, anything modern uses GPT. A clone generally carries this across fine, but if the new drive will not boot afterwards, a mismatch between the partition scheme and how the machine expects to boot is one of the first things to check.
You need both drives attached at once, which is obvious in hindsight and awkward in practice on a laptop with a single slot.
If you are fitting an M.2 drive internally and have not done it before, the physical installation is a separate job with its own small traps around standoffs and screws. Our step-by-step M.2 installation guide covers that part.
The specifics vary by tool, but the shape is always the same.
Alignment and TRIM used to need manual attention. Any current tool handles both correctly, so it is not something you need to configure.
Once it finishes, swap the drives over if you cloned through an enclosure, or change the boot order in your BIOS if both are installed internally.
Then check things properly before you touch the old drive:
Leave the old drive alone for a week or two. If something turns out to be missing, it is all still sitting there. Once you are confident, wipe it and reuse it, or keep it as a backup.
Usually one of a handful of things:
None of these are data loss. The clone is on the drive; the machine just needs telling how to start from it.
Back up first, because a clone is not one. Check for BitLocker and know where your recovery key is. Make sure your used space fits. Look at what free tool came with your drive before downloading anything, and be aware that guides pointing at Macrium Reflect Free are pointing at something that is no longer free. Then take your time over which drive is the source and which is the destination, and leave the old one intact until you are sure.
Done in that order it is a slow afternoon rather than a risky one, and the machine you get back at the end of it will feel like a different computer.
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