How to Clone Windows 10 to Ssd Western Digital Blue

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Can I clone Windows 10 to a smaller SSD without reinstalling OS?

Yes, you can easily clone/move/transfer Windows 10 to a smaller SSD or hard drive without reinstalling OS. Windows reinstallation will be a tough task for most Windows users, as it requires complicated skills and takes much time. Therefore, the ideal way of replacing an old hard drive for computer is cloning existing operating system to the new disk directly.

It is well known that SSDs are much faster than traditional hard drives and they've been gradually getting less expensive over the last few years. As a result, SSDs are chosen by more and more users to improve computer performance. The suggested way to make the best of the fast speed of SSD is using it as the primary disk where operating system and applications are installed. In this way, you will get faster speed to boot into Windows as well as use installed programs.

However, a fresh reinstallation of Windows on SSD will be a time-consuming process. You need to install Windows first, then install drivers and applications. In some cases, you may also need to customize some settings for the newly installed system. This might be the major reason that many users are reluctant to replacing hard drive with an SSD even though they know such operations can greatly speed up computer. If you are one of them, you can follow the guide discussed below to transfer Windows 10 or other Windows operating systems to new SSD/HDD easily and safely.

What is the best free disk cloning software for Windows 10?

Speaking of moving Windows 10 to a smaller SSD, a third-party program should be used here as Windows does not provide an easy solution. For users, free and reliable software will be the perfect choice. There are really lots of disk cloning programs available on the Internet, and yet few of them can clone disk to a smaller one free of charge. If you are looking for such software, you can try DiskGenius Free Edition first. DiskGenius covers following features:

Disk clone: it copies all partitions and data from one disk to another and provides three different ways to complete disk cloning.
Partition clone: it clones everything from one partition to another partition and supports to clone NTFS, exFAT, FAT32, FAT16, FAT12, EXT4, EXT3 and EXT2 partitions.
Migrate Windows intelligently: Operating system will be transferred to target hard drive or SSD without closing currently running system. Thus, you can transfer Windows OS to new SSD in the background. What's more, the target disk is allowed to be smaller than the old system disk.
Backup partition to image file: Full backup and incremental backup are supported when you back up a partition to an image file.
Clone hard drive with bad sectors: when hard drive develops bad sectors, you can try making a sector level clone for the disk. The cloning process can skip bad sectors.
4K alignment: 4K alignment is automatically performed on target drive while disk cloning, partition cloning or system migration.

How to clone Windows 10 to a smaller SSD free of charge?

The process of cloning Windows 10 made by DiskGenius is quite simple and safe, and you can try following steps to get it done. Before you start, please note following two points:

Connect the SSD to your computer properly and make sure it can be recognized by DiskGenius. It is recommended to connect SSD to motherboard instead of USB port.
Files on the disk that selected as target disk will be erased during cloning process. Make sure the SSD does not contain important data.

Step 1: Download and install DiskGenius Free Edition on your computer, and then open it. The Free edition supports to clone Windows from MBR to MBR, clone GPT to GPT, clone MBR to GPT and clone GPT to MBR.