How to Install Crucial SSD and Clone HDD to Crucial SSD Easily

About Crucial SSD install kit

If you want to clone HDD to Crucial SSD, you may think of buying the Crucial SSD install kit, which seems to include everything you need for cloning a hard drive to an SSD. The SSD install kit is available in the Crucial official site, and you can buy it for 17.49 dollars. The kit includes a USB-to-SATA cable, a 3.5-inch adapter bracket, few mounting screws, and standard SATA cable.

It also offers SSD cloning software - Acronis True Image for Crucial. However, this may not be good enough. The included data transfer software is old, and it is not compatible with GPT formatted hard drives. Is there such data transfer software that fully supports GPT disks when cloning hard drive to Crucial SSD? Just keep reading.

Best Crucial SSD clone software for Windows 11/10/8/7

Talking about specialized cloning software, AOMEI Backupper Professional tops the list. You can benefit a lot from its following features:

• It allows you to clone large hard drive to smaller SSD or clone smaller SSD to larger SSD with ease.
• It allows you to transfer only OS from one hard drive to another, thus saving storage space on the target disk.
• You can perform disk clone while Windows is running. No interruption to your work.
• If your computer is suffering from boot error, you can use it to create a bootable USB disk or CD/DVD to perform the clone without loading Windows.
• It supports nearly all common SSD brands or models, including Samsung/PNY/WD/Crucial SSD, SATA/M.2 NVMe SSD, etc.

Don’t hesitate to download this powerful disk cloning software!

AOMEI Backupper

Easiest hard drive clone software for Windows PC.

Download Demo
Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7

How to clone a hard drive to Crucial SSD

There are two main parts included in Crucial hard drive clone: install Crucial SSD and transfer data from old HDD to Crucial SSD. Learn the detailed steps below.

Install Crucial SSD

1. Shut down your system and remove the power cable. If you are using a laptop, remove the battery if applicable.

Tip: Hold the power button for 5 seconds after removing the battery. This will discharge any electricity left in the system.

2. Open the computer case and locate the SSD slot. You may consult your owner’s manual for exact instructions.

3. Insert the SSD. Depending on your computer, there might be a heat sink or screw that needs to be removed prior to inserting your new NVMe PCIe SSD.

4. Reassemble your system and turn on computer. Reconnect the battery as necessary.

Tip: If there is no extra SSD slot inside your computer, you may use a SATA-to-USB cable to connect the SSD to your computer externally.

Transfer data from HDD to Crucial SSD

🔰 Warning: The cloning process will remove everything on the target SSD. Backup any important files before you start clone.

1. Install and run the best cloning software - AOMEI Backupper. After the program loads successfully, click on "Clone" and select “Disk Clone”.

✿ Note: If you want to clone only OS, you can select “System Clone”.

2. Select the hard drive as source disk and Crucial SSD as destination disk successively.

3. Tick "SSD Alignment" to accelerate the reading and writing speed of the destination SSD. Click the "Start Clone" to start the cloning process.

Useful clone options

Also, you can use Sector by sector clone to copy all sectors including blank ones or Edit Partitions to adjust the partition size on the destination disk. And the latter one is more practical, since it resolves two potential issues during the cloning process. 

#1: The cloned drive not showing full capacity.

By default, all the cloning software keeps the old partition layout on the destination disk unless you change the partition size while cloning. To prevent this from the beginning, you can click Edit Partitions and choose:

👉 Add unused space to all partitions: It will reallocate the unallocated space to each partition of the target disk, appropriate for the disk size.

👉 Manually adjust partition size: It allows you to extend unallocated space to any partition on the destination disk as you want. 

#2: The cloned drive not bootable after cloning.

One of the biggest reasons is the destination and source disk have different partition styles and you don't convert them to the same before cloning. In this situation, you can simply check Convert the destination disk from MBR to GPT or vice versa, depending on the disk partition styles of them. 

Summary 

When the clone is in process, you can still use the computer to do your work. When the clone is done, you can boot your computer and change the SSD as first boot device to boot from the new cloned SSD.

AOMEI Backupper also provides backup and restore functions, so you can also backup the hard drive and restore to the SSD when you want to upgrade to SSD rather than clone HDD to Crucial SSD. Go for it and have a try.