How do I clone my old hard drive to my new SSD?

Disk Cloning
Disk cloning is the process of creating a 1-to-1 copy of a hard disk drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD), not just its files. Disk cloning may be used for upgrading a disk or replacing an aging disk with a fresh one. In this case, the clone can replace the original disk in its host computer. Disk cloning may also be used for disaster recovery or forensics.In the context of backup software, disk cloning is very similar to disk imaging; in case of the latter, a 1-to-1 copy of a disk is created inside a disk image file.Disk cloning may be done with specialized cloning software, backup software, disk imaging software that has the necessary features, or specialized hardware.

What You'll Need: An SSD
Obviously, in order to upgrade to an SSD, you'll need to, well, buy an SSD. We have some recommendations here, though if you're on a pretty strict budget, we have a separate list of cheap SSDs as well. Make sure to buy the right form factor for your computer (some laptops will use 2.5-inch drives, while others might use M.2 or mSATA drives), and get one big enough to fit all your data. If you have a 500GB hard drive now, you should probably spring for a similarly sized SSD (or larger, to accommodate for future data).
The only exception is if you're on a desktop computer and have room for multiple hard drives. In that case, you could store Windows and your programs on the SSD while putting your music, movies, and other media on a second, larger hard disk.

What You'll Need: A USB-to-SATA Clone Dock

Recommend a hard disk cloning device, USB 3.0 to SATA dual hard disk cloning device, with hard disk copy cloning function, suitable for 2.5 or 3.5 inch HDD, 2.5 inch SSD. During this process, you don't need to connect the SSD and the old hard drive to the computer, just insert the hard drive into the clone base. SSD supports offline cloning up to 400MB/S. No driver is required and installation is simple; offline cloning is from the source disk to the target disk, ensuring that the capacity of the target disk is greater than or equal to the capacity of the source disk.

What You'll Need: AOMEI Backupper for Windows

There are many different drive-cloning tools on the market, but when cloning a hard drive to SSD, I recommend AOMEI Backupper, since it's free, easy to use, and takes into account a few quirks that sometimes pop up during clones from hard drives to SSDs.
The free Standard version is fine; there's no need to upgrade to the paid version for what we're doing today. You will need to enter your email and subscribe to the newsletter to get the download link, though. Thankfully, you can just unsubscribe later.
Once you've gathered up those necessities, it's time to get started.

Back Up Your Data (and Free Up Space, if Necessary)
Click Next, then click on your SSD to select it as the destination disk—again, be very careful you're selecting the right disk here, since it will be erased and overwritten—and click Next again.
Even if your SSD is smaller than your current hard drive, AOMEI will resize the volume to fit. You shouldn't run into trouble unless your source drive contains more data than can fit on the new SSD.
Finally, you'll be given a summary of the upcoming operation, which you can double-check one last time. Check the SSD Alignment box along the bottom, which ensures you're getting the best performance from your SSD, and click the Start Clone button.

If your SSD is the same size or smaller than the old hard drive, the cloning process should be complete and you can skip to the next step.
However, if your upgraded SSD has less space than the old hard drive, you need to do one or two things. The Windows volume you copy to the SSD will be the same size as the original hard drive, and you will need to expand it to take up the rest of the disk. The Backupper Pro version allows you to perform this operation during the cloning process, but there is no charge-another AOMEI tool called Partition Assistant can perform this operation for free.

https://www.ubackup.com/clone/clone-large-hdd-to-smaller-ssd-4348.html

Install your solid state drive
Next, shut down the computer. It's time to install the SSD permanently in your computer. If your laptop has only one hard drive slot, you need to remove the old hard drive and replace it with an SSD. This is slightly different on every laptop. If you have a desktop computer with multiple hard drive slots, you can use the old hard drive as additional storage space and install the SSD next to it.