A new SSD is the single biggest speed upgrade an old PC can get — and cloning means you keep your Windows, programs, files and settings exactly as they are. This is the complete, careful walkthrough of cloning an HDD to an SSD with Macrium Reflect, in the right order, with the checks that stop the classic mistakes.
Reinstalling Windows from scratch after an SSD upgrade takes a full day of drivers, programs and settings. Cloning skips all of it: Macrium Reflect copies your existing system to the new SSD, partition by partition, and the PC boots from the SSD as if nothing changed — except everything is suddenly fast. This guide follows the same happy path as the video: a healthy old drive, a planned upgrade, no drama. Do the steps in order. The two places people go wrong are skipping the small system partitions and testing the first boot with both drives still connected — both are covered below, and both are free to avoid.
Cloning is a copy, and a copy is only as good as what it starts from. Run these three checks first; they take five minutes and decide whether this job is a calm upgrade or something else entirely.
On a desktop, the cleanest setup is to fit the SSD in its final home now — a spare SATA data cable plus a SATA power connector — and clone with the HDD still in place. On a laptop with one drive slot, connect the SSD through a USB to SATA adapter or a USB enclosure for the clone, and swap it inside afterwards. Either way, Windows should see the new disk in Disk Management before you start; if it does not, fix that first, because Reflect cannot clone to a disk the PC cannot see. The full adapter walkthrough is in the companion guides in this set.
If the SSD is the same size or bigger, Reflect can copy partitions as they are. If the SSD is smaller, this is where you shrink the big Windows partition to fit — select it on the destination, open Cloned Partition Properties, and drag the size down, leaving some free space rather than filling the SSD to the last megabyte. Reflect only needs room for the used data. One setting worth leaving alone: partition alignment. Reflect aligns partitions correctly for SSDs automatically during a clone — you do not need to hunt for an alignment option.
This is the step that proves the clone, and the order matters. Shut the PC down, disconnect the old HDD completely (data cable is enough on a desktop; on a laptop the SSD is now the only drive anyway), and start the PC. It should boot from the SSD into your familiar desktop — noticeably faster. Disconnecting the old drive is not superstition: with two bootable copies attached, some PCs quietly boot the old one, and you can spend an hour wondering why nothing feels faster. The dedicated guide in this set covers the boot-order fix if your PC ever does boot the wrong drive later. Test your main programs, open a few files, and restart once more before you call it done.
Two five-minute finishing tasks. First, confirm Windows is treating the new drive as an SSD by running fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify in a terminal — a result of DisableDeleteNotify = 0 means TRIM is enabled, which is what you want. Second, decide the old HDD's future deliberately: keep it disconnected for about a week as your instant fallback, then reconnect it, wipe its old Windows partitions, and use the whole disk as a plain data drive. Both finishing tasks have their own step-by-step guides in this set — follow them rather than improvising, especially the formatting order, because formatting the wrong disk is the one disaster this whole process is designed to avoid.
The video shows the entire clone on a real machine — connecting the SSD, the wizard screens, and the first fast boot. Watch it once before you start, and your own clone will feel familiar.
▶️ Watch Full VideoNo. Cloning reads the source disk and writes only to the destination. Your old HDD stays exactly as it was, which is why it works as a fallback afterwards. The disk that gets erased is the destination SSD — anything already on it is overwritten.
It depends on how much data is actually used and on the connection. Reflect copies only used sectors, so a half-empty drive clones far faster than its full size suggests. A typical home upgrade over SATA finishes in tens of minutes; a USB adapter is slower than an internal SATA connection.
Not any more, and it is better to know that before you start. Macrium retired the Free edition — the last free version was v8.0 and its security patches ended on 1 January 2024. Today Macrium offers Reflect X as a paid product with a full-featured 30-day free trial, and the trial's cloning works completely, which is enough for a one-time upgrade like this. An old Reflect Free install, if you still have one, also still clones — but it is unsupported now. The edition guide in this set explains all of this in detail.