MiniTool ShadowMaker tip: Clone Hard Drive to Smaller SSD

**SSD** or **Solid State Drive** will in no doubt will increase the speed of your PC or Laptop running **Windows 10** OS and in turn increases your productivity. But most of us have 1TB hard disk as a standard in your system and **cloning** or moving data to less size i.e 250GB or 500GB is kind of difficult as you can’t shrink 1 TB to 500GB with any software or tools. As far your work is concerned you will need less than 100 GB and Windows 10 OS after installation will be around 40 GB and with necessary software it will come around 50GB.

The disk capacity of an SSD is smaller than a traditional HDD bothered the majority of users.  The question comes to Is it possible to finish the disk cloning from a large HDD to smaller SDD? It can be done easily with right ways. Check it out.

#### How to Clone Hard Drive to Smaller SSD

It is not easy to clone a large disk to smaller one. In the software market, you will find there are many types of hard drive cloning software, however, most software only supports cloning a small disk to a larger one. MiniTool Software Ltd. has released two programs including MiniTool ShadowMaker and MiniTool Partition Wizard.

#### Clone HDD to Smaller SSD Using MiniTool ShadowMaker

Is MiniTool ShadowMaker suitable for you to clone a disk from large to smaller? Maybe this is the thing you want to know. At first glance, you can find it is a good backup & restore solution mainly for your computer file, partition or disk. Actually, it also offers you a powerful feature called **Clone Disk**, enabling you to transfer the entire system disk or data disk to a smaller SSD in Windows 10/8/7. Just use the Trial Edition of this SSD cloning software you have got and have a 30-day free trial or directly use its Professional Edition.

Step 1: Connect the SSD that has enough disk space to your computer. Then, double-click on the program icon and then enter the following interface. Here, you are required to choose one computer to manage, either Local Computer or Remote PC. Just click Connect button accordingly.

**Tip:** MiniTool ShadowMaker only allows you to control a PC on the same LAN. If you have a need, type a correct IP in the textbox and click Connect to continue.

Step 2: Then, perhaps you will ask where the cloning feature is. Please navigate to **Tools** tab located in the toolbar, and then click **Clone Disk** module to start to clone large HDD to smaller SSD.

Step 3: Whereafter, for a hard drive cloning, it is necessary to choose the large source disk and the smaller target disk.

**Tips:**
1. MiniTool ShadowMaker allows cloning a system disk or a data disk to another hard drive. Relatively speaking, it is common to choose system disk as the source disk.
2. Select the SSD you have connected to your PC as the target disk to save the copy.

Step 4: In the process page, all the information about the cloning will be listed including the source disk, destination disk, cloning elapsed time and remaining time.

If you can’t wait for the cloning to complete, click the button **Shut down the computer when the operation is completed** in advance. Conversely, just wait patiently.

As mentioned above, you can also clone hard drive to smaller SSD with MiniTool Partition Wizard.