Windows 10 is far more efficient compared to its predecessors, having improved booting times and better overall performance. However, moving from the traditional spinning Hard drives to a new Solid-state drive (SSD) can improve booting time and performance made even faster. There are a couple of ways to transfer your system data from your current HDD to a new SDD but today we are going to look at just one.
Using this method saves you all the hustles of having to reinstall the operating system, and in the process, you’re far more likely to lose all your data. You will also have to reinstall all your programs and drivers, and if you’ve ever gone through the pain of doing this, you understand why anyone would want to avoid that way of going about all this.
Moving Windows 10 to an SSD without Reinstalling
In this post, we shall be using one program; EaseUS ToDo Backup. This is a paid program that has tons of features, but for one-time use scenarios, the Free Trial has all the functionality we need to perform this task.
You first need to download EaseUS ToDo Backup from their official website, Install it and follow the following simple steps.
- Open EaseUS Todo backupChoose Clone from the left sidebarClick Disk CloneChoose your current hard drive with Windows 10 installed on as the source, and choose your SSD as the targetCheck Optimize for SSD (this assures that your partition is correctly ‘formatted’ for the SSD)Click NextEaseUS
- will begin copying your disk, you can check Shut down the computer when
- the operation completed, and your computer will turn off when to
- ‘transfer’ is done
If the move is completed without any errors (the only possible error that could appear is the message which tells you that your drive is too big, in that case, just delete more files from your HDD), your system is moved to the SSD, and all you need to do is to get rid of the HDD partition with Windows 10 on it.
To wipe your original drive, do the following:
- Open This ComputerFind your system drive and right click on itChoose FormatWait until the process is finished
And that’s about that, your Windows 10 is now successfully moved to the SSD drive, and it will perform a lot faster from now on.
But, we have one more thing to do, we must restore your personal files and user folders. Since you probably don’t have enough space on your SSD, we’ll have to restore your files to the old, formatted HDD drive. To move your personal files and user folders without causing any system errors, follow further instructions.
First, go to your old drive
(which is now completely empty), and create a new folder to store all
your user folders and personal files. Name it whatever you want (we used
WinReport). Now, go to C:Users
And finally, the only thing left to do is restoring your personal files. To restore your personal files to the old HDD drive, follow these steps:
- Open your backup (whatever you chose to be your backup destination, cloud, external storage, another partition, etc.)And
- drag all your user files (documents, music, pictures, and other files)
- to your new “My Documents,” “My Music,” and other user folders.
By doing this, all your personal files will be accessible, besides the fact that they’re not on the system partition. But you may need to change the settings of your favorite apps and games, because they’ll probably save files in the ‘old’ My Documents.
That would be all, we presented you a full guide on how to move your Windows 10 system from your old HDD partition to the SSD, and how to get everything to work. So, if you’re planning to move your system to the SSD, I think this article features everything you need to know.
If you followed our instructions, and successfully moved your system to the SSD, please tell us your impressions in the comments.
